What Is SOPA?
If you hadn't heard of SOPA before, you probably have by now: Some of the internet's most influential sites—Reddit and Wikipedia among them—are going dark to protest the much-maligned anti-piracy bill. But other than being a very bad thing, what is SOPA? And what will it mean for you if it passes?
SOPA is an anti-piracy bill working its way through Congress...
House Judiciary Committee Chair and Texas Republican Lamar Smith, along with 12 co-sponsors, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act on October 26th of last year. Debate on H.R. 3261, as it's formally known, has consisted of one hearing on November 16th and a "mark-up period" on December 15th, which was designed to make the bill more agreeable to both parties. Its counterpart in the Senate is the Protect IP Act (S. 968). Also known by its cuter-but-still-deadly name: PIPA. There will likely be a vote on PIPA next Wednesday; SOPA discussions had been placed on hold but will resume in February of this year.
...that would grant content creators extraordinary power over the internet...
The beating heart of SOPA is the ability of intellectual property owners (read: movie studios and record labels) to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim. If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of The Dark Knight, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and—most dangerously—that the site's ISP prevent people from even going there.
...which would go almost comedically unchecked...
Perhaps the most galling thing about SOPA in its original construction is that it let IP owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off. All it required was a single letter claiming a "good faith belief" that the target site has infringed on its content. Once Google or PayPal or whoever received the quarantine notice, they would have five days to either abide or to challenge the claim in court. Rights holders still have the power to request that kind of blockade, but in the most recent version of the bill the five day window has softened, and companies now would need the court's permission.
The language in SOPA implies that it's aimed squarely at foreign offenders; that's why it focuses on cutting off sources of funding and traffic (generally US-based) rather than directly attacking a targeted site (which is outside of US legal jurisdiction) directly. But that's just part of it.
...to the point of potentially creating an "Internet Blacklist"...
Here's the other thing: Payment processors or content providers like Visa or YouTube don't even need a letter shut off a site's resources. The bill's "vigilante" provision gives broad immunity to any provider who proactively shutters sites it considers to be infringers. Which means the MPAA just needs to publicize one list of infringing sites to get those sites blacklisted from the internet.
Potential for abuse is rampant. As Public Knowledge points out, Google could easily take it upon itself to delist every viral video site on the internet with a "good faith belief" that they're hosting copyrighted material. Leaving YouTube as the only major video portal. Comcast (an ISP) owns NBC (a content provider). Think they might have an interest in shuttering some rival domains? Under SOPA, they can do it without even asking for permission.
...while exacting a huge cost from nearly every site you use daily...
SOPA also includes an "anti-circumvention" clause, which holds that telling people how to work around SOPA is nearly as bad as violating its main provisions. In other words: if your status update links to The Pirate Bay, Facebook would be legally obligated to remove it. Ditto tweets, YouTube videos, Tumblr or WordPress posts, or sites indexed by Google. And if Google, Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook, etc. let it stand? They face a government "enjoinment." They could and would be shut down.
The resources it would take to self-police are monumental for established companies, and unattainable for start-ups. SOPA would censor every online social outlet you have, and prevent new ones from emerging.
...and potentially disappearing your entire digital life...
The party line on SOPA is that it only affects seedy off-shore torrent sites. That's false. As the big legal brains at Bricoleur point out, the potential collateral damage is huge. And it's you. Because while Facebook and Twitter have the financial wherewithal to stave off anti-circumvention shut down notices, the smaller sites you use to store your photos, your videos, and your thoughts may not. If the government decides any part of that site infringes on copyright and proves it in court? Poof. Your digital life is gone, and you can't get it back.
...while still managing to be both unnecessary and ineffective...
What's saddest about SOPA is that it's pointless on two fronts. In the US, the MPAA, and RIAA already have the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to request that infringing material be taken down. We've all seen enough "video removed" messages to know that it works just fine.
As for the foreign operators, you might as well be throwing darts at a tse-tse fly. The poster child of overseas torrenting, Pirate Bay, has made it perfectly clear that they're not frightened in the least. And why should they be? Its proprietors have successfully evaded any technological attempt to shut them down so far. Its advertising partners aren't US-based, so they can't be choked out. But more important than Pirate Bay itself is the idea of Pirate Bay, and the hundreds or thousands of sites like it, as populous and resilient as mushrooms in a marsh. Forget the question of should SOPA succeed. It's incredibly unlikely that it could. At least at its stated goals.
...but stands a shockingly good chance of passing...
SOPA is, objectively, an unfeasible trainwreck of a bill, one that willfully misunderstands the nature of the internet and portends huge financial and cultural losses. The White House has come out strongly against it. As have hundreds of venture capitalists and dozens of the men and women who helped build the internet in the first place. In spite of all this, it remains popular in the House of Representatives.
That mark-up period on December 15th, the one that was supposed to transform the bill into something more manageable? Useless. Twenty sanity-fueled amendments were flat-out rejected. And while the bill's most controversial provision—mandatory DNS filtering—was thankfully taken off the table recently, in practice internet providers would almost certainly still use DNS as a tool to shut an accused site down.
...unless we do something about it.
The momentum behind the anti-SOPA movement has been slow to build, but we're finally at a saturation point. Wikipedia, BoingBoing, WordPress, TwitPic: they'll all be dark on January 18th. An anti-SOPA rally has been planned for tomorrow afternoon in New York. The list of companies supporting SOPA is long but shrinking, thanks in no small part to the emails and phone calls they've received in the last few months.
So keep calling. Keep emailing. Most of all, keep making it known that the internet was built on the same principles of freedom that this country was. It should be afforded to the same rights.
Source: www.gizmodo.com
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Wikipedia Blackout 101: What exactly are SOPA and PIPA ?
A rundown of the basics on the controversial anti-piracy bills
By Braden Goyette / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
January 18 2012
George Doyle/Getty Images
The entertainment industry is going head-to-head with the tech world over two controversial anti-online piracy bills being discussed in Congress.Related StoriesWas it an inside job? Google probing its own employees over cyber attack Wikipedia blackout prompts hundreds of other websites to join Internet strike in protest of anti-piracy legislation Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announces blackout to protest anti-piracy bills in Congress Who, me?! Illinois man's shock captured in surprise mugshot Seven kids charged in brutal beating of 13-year-old on school bus in Florida 7 amazing diet tricks you've never heard of; How to stick to your weight loss plan in 2012 So where did Wikipedia go?
That’s a question millions of people are asking this morning as they find the popular online encyclopedia has gone dark.
Wikipedia, Craigslist, Reddit and other websites have blacked out in protest against two anti-piracy bills in Congress — the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA) — that are pitting the entertainment industry against the tech world.
The bills were designed to stop piracy of copyrighted music, movies, and television shows. But critics including Google, Twitter, and some of the original architects of the Internet itself, say the legislation could censor the Internet, hobble online innovation and change what made the Internet what it is today.
Here’s our breakdown of what it all means.
JUST WHAT ARE SOPA AND PIPA?
Simply put, they would give copyright holders new ways to punish websites that host pirated content.
Both bills originally empowered copyright holders to request orders that would block access to foreign websites accused of hosting pirated content.
That means that users within the U.S. would essentially see an error message when they try to visit that website, though users in other countries would still be able to visit it. This provision has been removed from SOPA pending "further examination," though it's still included in PIPA.
SOPA also requires search engines to delete links to offending websites from their search results, while PIPA does not.
Both bills require advertisers and payment services not to do business with sites accused of piracy. They also allow internet service providers to pre-emptively block websites they believe are dedicated to piracy.
SOPA and PIPA target websites whose servers are hosted or whose domain names are registered outside of the U.S. While supporters of the bills say that this shouldn’t have any effect on American websites, many American companies have domain names registered overseas -- think of all the sites that end in letters like .ly. Though no one knows how the bills would ultimately be enforced if they became law, critics argue that domestic sites could be slammed with SOPA/PIPA-related lawsuits, and that the increased legal costs involved in running a website would raise a higher bar to founding an internet startup.
Existing U.S. law already allows the government to seize the domains of domestically hosted websites, but it first gives websites a chance to take down infringing content that may have been posted by the site's users.
WHY ARE CRITICS SO ALARMED?
Critics say the bills effectively give copyright holders the power to cripple sites they've accused of piracy, without proving that those websites are actually dedicated to spreading pirated content. With the power to block a website’s domain, delist it from search results, and force advertisers to stop doing business with them, critics fear copyright holders will be given a powerful tool to force websites out of existance.
The bills' opponents say this power could be abused for censorship, and that it threatens the free flow of information and the potential for innovation online.
“We have strong indications from venture capitalists that they would find it hard to invest in new start-ups in the user-generated content space,” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told the BBC. “Certainly innovations like Wikipedia would become very difficult if it were necessary for us to police everything that users were doing against some blacklist of websites.”
Internet security experts have also argued that blocking domain names would hamper cybersecurity efforts. On his blog, former DHS Assistant Secretary Stewart Baker wrote that the practice would "do great damage to Internet security, mainly by putting obstacles in the way of DNSSEC, a protocol designed to limit certain kinds of Internet crime." Essentially, it would become impossible for the authorities to tell the difference between websites that have been blocked for alleged piracy and sites that have been maliciously hacked.
SO WHO’S IN FAVOR AND WHO’S OPPOSED?
Music, movie, and television producers have been active in pushing for the legislation, saying that they are losing billions of dollars to piracy each year. "Every day, American jobs are threatened by thieves from foreign-based rogue websites," the Motion Picture Association of America said in a statement Saturday. "This deplorable situation persists because U.S. law enforcement does not have the tools to fight back."
The AFL-CIO also supports SOPA and PIPA, arguing that the measures protect American jobs.
Tech giants like Twitter, Facebook, and Google, and Internet freedom organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have opposed the measure.
The White House came out against the bills as written on Saturday. "While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet," three White House advisers said in a statement.
In Congress, legislators on both sides of the aisle support and oppose the bill. ProPublica has an overview of where everyone stands, including how much money they’ve received from the entertainment and tech industries.
WHERE DO THESE BILLS STAND?
SOPA is coming back to committee for a markup session in February, according to a release from one of its sponsors, Rep. Lamar Smith.
PIPA is still scheduled to go up for a procedural vote in the Senate Jan. 24.
Six GOP Senators have asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to postpone the vote, citing concerns about domain blocking in particular.
Source: www.nydailynews.com
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