Why SOPA Should Matter to You
Whether you are an internet junkie or a casual Facebook user, the term SOPA should be high on your radar this week. SOPA (the Stop Internet Piracy Act), or HR 3261, strengthens the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods by making the streaming off unauthorized online content a felony. If a court order is brought against a site suspected of violating SOPA, the bill would also bar online advertising networks and payment companies (think PayPal) from doing business with them, bar search engines from linking to them, and require Internet service providers to block access to them. SOPA will be reviewed by the House Judiciary Committee later this month and will be debated by the Senate on January 24.
Those in favor of SOPA argue that it will help to protect the intellectual property rights of content creators and patent holders and thus is an important measure to also protect the U.S. economy. Certain American industries, such as the motion picture and television industry and the pharmaceutical industry, are strongly in favor of SOPA.
SOPA’s opponents see the bill as a threat to free speech and are particularly concerned that other countries may follow the U.S. example and ban access to sites whose content they disagree with. And because the bill makes internet companies liable for their users’ actions, many fear that it would severely impact such sites as YouTube, Flickr, Etsy and Vimeo, where content is user-generated. The biggest problem with SOPA seems to be that its language is very broad. Whereas currently a copyright holder must serve notice on a site that it believes is hosting pirated content and thereby provide that site an opportunity to remove the content, the new bill would require search engines to immediately block the site. Perhaps the most chilling indicator of the impact that SOPA could have can be found in the results of a survey conducted by Booz & Company in which almost every venture capitalist and angel investor questioned indicated that they would stop investing in digital media intermediaries if SOPA passes.
Why should SOPA matter to you? A large majority of the internet’s largest companies are vehemently opposed to SOPA and, led by Wikipedia, they are planning a possible “Internet blackout” for later this month. The companies involved include AOL, Ebay, Etsy, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, LinkedIn, Paypal, Twitter, and Yahoo. No one knows whether – or when – the blackout will happen, but most suspect that the likely date is January 23, the day before the Senate begins to debate the bill. Until then, imagine what a day without the internet would be like!