It’s been a week since the Wikipedia blackout. Over 7,000 websites participated in various forms of the protest, such as Reddit also going dark, or Google featuring a blacked-out logo. The numerous websites were protesting the efforts of the Entertainment and Media lobbies to pass the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Here’s why:
Texas Republican Lamar Smith and House Judiciary Committee Chair, along with 12 co-sponsors, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act on October 26th, 2011. H.R. 3261 was its formal title. The Senate has the Protect IP Act (S. 968), as a counterpart. These two bills give the authority to the courts to allow judges to unilaterally shut down websites for having any copy-written material posted on the site. It was meant as a countermeasure to intellectual property theft, but its potential unintended consequences caused a bit of a ruckus.
SOPA was designed specifically to take on foreign offenders, allowing rights holders to force Google to remove sites from results, demand PayPal to stop payments to the site owners, and blockade the site’s ISP. While lofty goals, the language of the bill indicated that the politicians putting forth the bill had little understanding of the impact it had on various elements of the internet’s vast ecosystem.
Where this bill impacts the internet the most is in the ever-changing landscape of online innovation. The investors that have previously put millions of dollars into the next Facebook, would seal their wallets shut, as the disruption that can occur any moment to a fledgling website, without warning, would be too deadly to a new website’s growth. Websites that are currently online would be forced to employ thousands of people for the single purpose of self-policing content that is posted every second of the day. The magnitude of such an expense would outweigh the desire to continue offering the website to the public. Hundreds, if not thousands, would shut down website overnight.
The other part of this process that seems to make SOPA and PIPA unnecessary is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows rights holders to put in a request to a website, to which they remove any infringing media. Having seen plenty of “Video Has Been Removed” openings to videos on popular sites, the belief is that this method seems to be doing just fine and SOPA is beyond overkill.
The Congress of the United States was swayed by the efforts that took place a week ago, which included five of the original co-sponsors to drop their support of the bill. SOPA and PIPA have been put on a lengthy hold to review the language that had massive unintended consequences. For now, the crisis is averted, but it will be back.
About Robert Sloan
