This morning I got on the Wikipedia site to look up something. Suddenly, a black screen came up with the notification that the site was blacked out for 24 hours in opposition to congressional legislation that they believe would greatly restrict and hamper the free flow of information on the Internet. While noting that today's Gainesville Sun carried nothing about the protest blackout being staged by various sites against anti-piracy Internet legislation in Congress, I was able to find an article about it in the Independent Florida Alligator. According to it, the SOPA and PIPA bills, under consideration in the House and Senate respectively, would allow entertainment companies to shut down domains that not only host material they deem to be pirated but even just offer a link. I had read earlier on that the Obama Administration opposed these bills for a different reason: the technical parameters included in the bills would inhibit our nation's security agencies from effectively combating cyber-terrorism and malicious hacking. Not being technically versed in the subject, I wonder about a few things...
How do I know for sure if some site I link to on this blog contains pirated material or not? So how would closing my site down in any way be justified? And I have surfed the blogosphere many, many times and discovered how much other bloggers make free use of obviously copyright-protected pictures to enhance the visual appeal of their own blogs. Since this is a pervasive phenomenon, would all of these blogs get shut down, too?
Entertainment companies do not own the Internet and should not have the right to cut the flow of free speech based on their desires for profit. I am sure that piracy and copyright infringement are big problems, but there has to be a better way to deal with them other then give big business even more power over individual people. There is already too much of that going on as it is!
Anyway, isn't there already a mechanism for dealing with piracy and copyright infringement? If you think that someone is messing with your proprietary rights in these ways, then take them to court and sue them if notifying them first doesn't do the trick! I'm not all that well versed in law either, but it seems that these bills are an attempt to criminalize activities that traditionally have belonged in civil, not criminal law courts. Not good.
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2 comments:
SOPA (the House version) and PIPA (the Senate version) are, indeed, bad bills — not just socially bad, as you point out, but also technically bad, as the remedies they provide are at the same time easily bypassed by those who know how, and damaging to the Internet as a whole. There's plenty to read about them that sums it all up nicely.
But the reason this sort of legislation is out there in the first place is that taking it to the courts, which you suggest, doesn't work well with a world-wide Internet that spans many jurisdictions. Because it's hard (or impossible) to take someone to U.S. court who runs a site in Parador that violates U.S. law, we get attempts to use questionable technological mechanisms — which rely on the extent to which U.S. infrastructure is part of the backbone of the Internet — to block the violators... without due process and without due concern for the other effects these measures have.
The answer is not to use technological attacks that go beyond our borders and that threaten the Internet, but to pursue international agreements that allow prosecutions across national boundaries. But, of course, that's much harder and takes much longer.
It's also too common for legislators with no knowledge of the technical ramifications of the laws they and their staffs are writing to push their legislation despite (and even in defiance of) strong objection from the technical experts who know what the results can be. Some of the legislators behind SOPA (such as Lamar Alexander) actually take an odd pride in saying that they're not techno-geeks, implying that it's a good thing. When you're dealing in a field such as this, it's most assuredly not a good thing.
Draconian, over-sweeping legislation with probably all sorts of hidden "goodies" that benefit certain parties at the expense of others seems to be a typical, recurring feature of our Congress. I think that this sort of thing scared a lot of people when the health insurance reform act was debated and passed a couple of years ago.
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