COMMENTARY | The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are two bills being debated by Congress supposedly to protect Internet piracy. That’s a good front, but they are really about government trying to reach its tentacles out to the Internet, the most influential medium today. The Internet is more important for information gathering than television, newspapers and the radio, and the government wants to control it.
Here are the mainstream arguments for and against SOPA and PIPA: people who want these bills passed — Hollywood, the music industry and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — say that SOPA and PIPA will give us a way to fight websites outside the U.S. that steal and use text, video clips and images they find on the Internet. (Our Internet copyright law applies to people in the U.S. only.) People who want SOPA and PIPA defeated believe that the acts would give the government a way to shut down websites and that they promote censorship.
What isn’t reported by SOPA and PIPA supporters is that the United States Department of Justice can shut down foreign rogue sites without this legislation anyway as demonstrated by the Megaupload incident. The DOJ shut down this New Zealand site, arrested people associated with it and seized assets that totaled millions of dollars. The timing of this raid is about as bad as buying your dream house right before 2008. The Justice Department could not have helped the opposition for SOPA and PIPA any better. Kudos to the Department.
The “hacktivist” group Anonymous, to use the famous line from the movie “Network” was “as mad as hell and was not going to take this anymore” and shut down the DOJ website. They took down record label sites, too, for good measure. This was the largest attack so far by Anonymous.
Internet piracy needs to be dealt with, but SOPA and PIPA are not the answers. They would place the burden on sites such as Wikipedia and Google (two sites that led the protests on “blackout” day) to police all the links on their sites. Even if that were feasible, it could result in taking down legitimate websites that might have been wrongly accused of copyright infringement. Again, government censorship anyone?