Have you heard about SOPA? It’s the Stop Online Piracy Act. Well, it might as well be the Stop Online Privacy
Act. Under the guise of protecting
American business from media pirates, counterfeiters, and other such illegal
internet activity, the government is preparing to fundamentally change the face
of the internet. Assuming of course they
don’t effectively destroy it altogether.
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| Post-SOPA Google results. (Click to enlarge) |
The purported goal of this bill is to stop sales of
counterfeit items (purses, watches, etc.); stop the sale/sharing of pirated music,
books, and movies; and stop the sale of prescription drugs without a
prescription over the internet. The proponents
tell us the bill is designed only to target overseas sites… but the bill does
not say that. In fact, there is wording
in it that indicates that participating in file sharing is punishable. Well, how do you suppose they will know if
you are, or are not, sharing files? By
watching you. By monitoring your internet
usage. Farewell privacy.
Next comes tackling plagiarism. Take for instance the following sentence that
I found when I Googled Edgar Allan Poe (I picked Poe at random to try to find
an example like the one you're about to see… it was my first try):
The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen,
premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead.
This is the first sentence on the Edgar Allan Poe Museum’s website. I found this same sentence on a minimum of
six other websites (without looking hard at all). One of them included the news site Orlando
Sentinel. In fact, they printed the
first full three sentences, verbatim, from the Poe Museum’s website. There is no reference; there is no
attribution. Theater critic Matthew J.
Palm (shame on you Matt) plagiarized a website, and by the wording of the SOPA
not only must the offending page be taken down, but the whole Orlando Sentinel website
can be taken down. Ready for the scary
part? As of the time I am typing this,
it would not even require a court order to take down the page. Google and Bing could remove search engine
results and Verizon and Cox Cable could block content voluntarily. Hasta la vista freedom of the press. Yet the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Lamar Smith
(R-TX), claims there is no proof that this legislation could harm the internet. Did I mention that 83 prominent internet
inventors and engineers sent the Congress a letter? You should read
it.
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| In order to save money, Ethel was brought in to handle copyright enforcement. |
And how would ISPs enforce this bill? They won’t hire an army of techs to go
through every webpage looking for repeated phrases. No, it would far easier (and cheaper) to
build a filter that looks for X number of words in a row that are the same and
then blocks all offending webpages. You can’t
block all but the oldest webpage because it may have been plagiarized from
another form of media, or from a website that has already been blocked. Keep in mind too that this doesn’t just affect
ISPs, it hits search engines, advertisers, and brokers (such as PayPal). Well, the advertisers and brokers are going
to have legal standing to put the onus on the search engines (Your honor, my
client wouldn’t have advertised on xyz.com if Google hadn’t sent traffic there). Weak, but imaginable. In addition, let’s face it advertiser and broker infrastructures aren’t designed to comply with this bill. The ISPs aren’t either. The search engines are though. So everyone will contract through the search
engines to keep them on the straight and level, which will increase the cost of
ISPs and brokers, and reduce the money advertisers pay to site that carry their
advertisements. (By the way, did you click
the ad at the top of this page yet?)
Also, the bill’s language is vague. Essentially, if you have a video that you
shot at a bowling alley and they are playing music in the background, you
cannot post your video. If you have
video of your 6-year-old reading from a book, you cannot post that video. If you have video of your dog doing something
stupid in the living room and you can see Lord
of the Rings playing on the TV, you cannot post that video. Now realistically this is the law now. In fact, the singer Prince sued YouTube,
eBay, PirateBay, and three of his fan sites.
Yeah, he sued his fans for posting pictures, album art and lyrics. Classy.
Anyway, with this new bill he wouldn’t even need to sue them. He could call the Attorney General's office and have
the offending pages and/or sites taken down.
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| Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present the United States Attorney General. |
Attorney General Eric Holder provides a great transition into
our last subject. Suppose a blogger out
there decided to say the following… Eric Holder is an ignorant buffoon whose incompetent
decision-making is the result of sheer arrogance and racists ideals rather than
relevant facts and legal purview.
Imagining such a statement should not be difficult as I just made it…
and I meant it. Now let’s say that
Holder sees that statement and decides it is less than flattering. How long do you think it would take him to
find something on one of my blogs he could claim is plagiarized? If he had to, he could expand his search to include
all of Blogspot. My blog could be erased
in the blink of an eye. While that
would thrill most people to no end, every blog, news source, forum, and social
media site would be subject to the same scrutiny. Goodbye freedom of speech. Do I think it would go that far? I hope not, but history shows that once the
government has power, the government uses power. And remember, the US government is the same one
that has been lambasting China’s internet filtering practice…
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| What's worse? What this picture represents? or the fact that I used it without permission? |
So there are my beefs with SOPA. I could go on. I strongly encourage everyone who comes this
way to not only share your thoughts below, but share them with your Congressmen! This bill hasn’t even cleared committee yet,
get heard NOW!! This is a completely nonpartisan issue, there are Rs & Ds
on both sides so don’t assume your representative is on your side. Those of you opposed to the Patriot Act
should be appalled by SOPA, though I can justify forfeiture of some rights to
protect the nation a lot faster than I can justify forfeiture of rights to
protect Steven Spielberg’s royalties check.
The bottom line is this, piracy is stealing, and stealing is wrong, but
no one can justify the blanket infringement of Constitutional rights to stop a
few criminals committing nonviolent crimes. As the bumper sticker
says…
My freedom is more
important than your good idea.
(My apologies to whomever
I just plagiarized.)
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Are you sitting down, Squid? I hope so, because I agree with you 100% on this one. This is a clear case of corporations telling us what we can and cannot think and say. What arrogance! This needs to go down, big time. I'll be letting my senators and reps know how I feel; I'm sure you'll do the same.
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