Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2011; it was written while SOPA was being debated in the US Congress. After the internet blackout protests of 18 January 2012, the bill was shelved and never passed, though the article reads as if the law were still a live threat.
A new threat to freedom of expression on the internet, under the pretext of protecting copyrighted works. Does this mean we think anyone should be able to profit by harming the film and music industry’s business? Of course not, but the measures the United States wants to take with the SOPA law are disproportionate, especially considering that they aren’t going to put an end to online piracy.
Devin Coldewey, of TechCrunch, has written an excellent explanation of the consequences the SOPA law could have: a law that would allow the United States to block whichever websites it sees fit (even if they aren’t hosted in the United States) for infringing intellectual property rights. And the problem doesn’t end there, because intermediaries or service providers that haven’t taken steps to stop such content appearing on any of their services would be penalised in the same way.
What does this mean? In short, under the SOPA law legal action could be taken against Facebook if a user uploaded a copyrighted video, or against Google for letting its search engine host content that infringes intellectual property, or for allowing infringers to use its blogging platform, Blogger.com.
Under this law, a complaint would be filed and these big service providers would be asked to remove the “infringing” content in less than 5 days, so they wouldn’t think twice about removing it as soon as possible to avoid a financial penalty. Put another way, with the SOPA law the presumption of innocence would go out of the window and providers wouldn’t take the risk, because no legal team could resolve the case in 5 days. And small sites couldn’t even afford a legal defence.
Why do we talk about censorship with SOPA?
This law would use the same method that is already established in countries such as China, Syria or Iran. Websites whose content goes against the regime or against religion are censored by those governments through DNS blocking.
To understand the consequences this law could have, here is a simple example:
If you type the word “Facebook” into a search engine in Spain, you’re immediately shown results that take you to the Facebook social network. If you type “Facebook” in China, the social network won’t appear in the search results, because it’s censored: the Chinese government has another social network and isn’t interested in competition. In the same way, China blocks a large part of Google’s services. Well, with this law the United States now wants to exercise the same censorship as China.
The piracy problem has provided the perfect excuse to police the internet and decide which websites stay up and which don’t, because this law is a switch that decides what content is shown online. Obviously Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Zynga and others are completely against this law. In fact, Eric Schmidt (Google) is fighting the SOPA law, because he knows Google couldn’t comply with all the restrictions being demanded.
It’s true that the internet business model, with its “everything for free” approach, is a problem. It certainly isn’t ethical for someone to create a work (music, a film, etc.) and for thousands of people to be able to download and consume it within a few hours without the creator earning anything from it. That isn’t ethical, it isn’t healthy and it isn’t sustainable, so a solution needs to be found. But the SOPA law is, without any doubt, not the solution. As Devin Coldewey rightly argues, only the uninformed could be in favour of this law: it would be like dropping an atomic bomb on a country to stop three criminals. What’s your opinion of the SOPA law?
Featured image: RoySmith, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
