By Bradi Schultz, editor
Being a college student, I frequently use the Internet for class assignments, but I also use many of the social networking sites such as Twitter and Tumblr. Imagine my surprise Jan. 18 when some of the world’s most popular Internet destinations reacted in protest against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), advising their users to protest.
After getting ready for class that morning I had some extra time, so I decided to get on Tumblr, and I received something unexpected.
As the page loaded, a large pop-up appeared on my screen from the website.
“Congress is holding hearing today and will soon pass a bill empowering corporations to censor the Internet unless you tell them no,” read the pop-up.
Underneath this there was space to provide your phone number, address and ZIP code to enter in the protest against the two proposed bills. It also gave you the option to black out your Tumblr for the day to help the protest as well.
This minor step did not have the effect that the black out of Wikipedia did. The online encyclopedia took that day to show everyone how much SOPA and PIPA could actually affect everyone who uses the Internet.
I don’t know how many times that day I ended up on the Wikipedia website to try and find out information, mostly just to look up silly little facts I wanted to know more about. Nonetheless it was a bit frustrating not being able to use the site even if it was for something so little.
My point is that every time I tried to go to Wikipedia the message would come up also asking for your ZIP code so that it could give you information to contact the right representatives. According to the website, 162 million web users also saw the protest.
More than 8 million looked up their elected representatives’ information through the Wikipedia tool, making the Senate’s website unable to accommodate the numerous citizens attempting to use its contact forms.
“You said no,” the website said on its thank you page. “You shut down Congress’s switchboards. You melted their servers. Your voice was loud and strong. Millions of people have spoken in defense of a free and open Internet.”
After seeing this, the next day I decided to do a little research on what exactly SOPA and PIPA mean.
SOPA is a federal bill that is being introduced to help U.S. law enforcement take down online trafficking of copyrighted goods. PIPA is a law proposed with the goal of giving the government and copyright holders the appropriate tools to restrain access to the websites that are benefiting from online piracy.
After spending countless hours looking up more information and articles on what these bills mean and the outcry on the Internet to stop them, my brain was on overload with information. It seems to me that these bills have the right idea in mind but may not be within reach of the exact solution.
Wanting to stop to online piracy is a fine idea because of the countless number of people who are losing money from this, but I don’t believe that their ways of doing so are going to do any good.
The proposed way of taking care of this problem is to bar online advertising networks from doing business with the websites that are accused of piracy, barring search engines from linking to the websites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to the sites.
The problem I see with this is that this could get completely out of hand. Who knows how many people are just uneducated on the copyright laws and do this by accident? I know that is not an excuse for pirating someone else’s work, but it does not seem just to punish someone for a simple accident.
Also, I see there will still be pirating even if these two bills are passed as laws. A part of the process to seek help if someone is being harmed from piracy is the rights holder must notify, in writing, payment facilitators who must then forward the notification and suspend services to the website that is doing the pirating. Then, unless the site provides a counter notification explaining how it is not violating terms, the rights holder can sue.
This doesn’t seem foolproof to me. Hackers around the world can easily gain access to people’s computers and files, so I don’t see how they could not find a way around this. Adding to this, I don’t believe that there is a way for every person who has some type of work out, whether it be a book, music or movie, to have the knowledge that someone is pirating their work and be able to report it These two bills don’t seem to be foolproof.
So my question to you is, what do you think about all of this? Will these bills, if passed, have any if little effect on piracy? How?
After doing other papers on the subject of piracy and seeing how easy it is to pirate items from the Internet, I just don’t see how these two bills are going to put an end to this.