SOPA is not good news for the Internet
I’m sure you would have heard about SOPA by now, but if not, it stands for Stop Online Piracy Act, and is a recent bill tabled in the US House of Representatives on October 26th, 2011. Although SOPA at the surface seems to be for a good cause, in that its objective is to fight content piracy, yet if you look closer, it is a dangerous piece of legislation that if passed, will have a lot of potential to disrupt the Web as a whole.
The bottom line is that SOPA makes it possible to take down almost any website on copyright infringement grounds without even going through any proper due process; it’s a shoot first, talk later approach. Under SOPA, any website can potentially be taken down, or blocked, if just a small percentage of its pages host copyright material, or even if it links to such sites. If the previous DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) was at least quite workable in practice, SOPA can now be likened to using a shotgun approach to go after flying mosquitoes. Yes, mosquitoes are no doubt annoying, but you don’t deal with them using a shotgun!
The wording in SOPA is quite broad and vague, so its scope to cause a lot of collateral damage is huge indeed. It goes without saying that virtually all the large Web based companies that create content in one form or another, is opposed to SOPA, while many record labels and large businesses unfortunately, support it. Godaddy initially supported it, but after a boycott Godaddy campaign in which many people moved their domains out of Godaddy, they seemed to have done an about-turn.
I am sure at least 95% of web surfers all over the globe would disagree with it if only they were made aware about it. 2012 may well start off with such a damper if the US Congress moves closer to approving the bill when they convene sometime in Jan 2012.
One suggestion that seems workable would be for the top Internet companies to have a “mass blackout” day, but I think the will to do it seems to be lacking – for want of a better word. There isn’t much time before this law is passed, and those who oppose it really need to get their act together, and soon.
This is one good act that could indeed have many negative repercussions. Although a law which prevents content piracy is needed, the subject is so delicate, that it needs to be treated with lot of care.
I’m glad you wrote about this on your blog. The mass blackout will be on January 23 right? I’ve spread the word about it on Facebook and Twitter and it seems like only small group of people actually care.
I didn’t know about this and boy am glad you’ve written on it. In one way you can say that it would be good because a lot of content get stolen and put on website claiming to be there own.
And in the other hand, if some hires a writer and he or she delivers half ass content that is not original but the end user didn’t and bam they got the full brunt of this act.
it will turn the web up side down for sure. i hope it doesn’t pass!!