Here is my take on SOPA and PIPA. I wrote this for my Computers and Society course.
On Wednesday, the 18th of January, the internet went dark. Not the whole internet and not completely. A large amount of websites, initially proposed by Reddit, decided to go dark on that day to protest SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, the Protect IP Act, which in itself is short for “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act”. SOPA and PIPA being similar bills that are proposed to help control online piracy and counterfeit goods. SOPA being the version proposed in the House of representatives in Congress and PIPA being in the Senate.
The two bills claim that they will help battle piracy. In fact, the bills will not do anything of that sort and instead break the internet. The main thing that people opposed about the bill, and the part that was the most clearly wrong and easiest to explain, was the DNS provisions. In the proposal, an entity with a legitimate concern of copyright infringement, can go to court and get the Attorney General to declare the site in question blacklisted. This is bad on two levels. First, blacklists do not work. The major example of this is with spam. If blacklists worked, then we would no longer see any spam. But spam is still there for everyone. So, why bother creating a law that would be useless? The second part is the implications to DNSSEC which stands for DNS Security. DNS being being the Domain Name System. It maps human-readable website addresses such as http://www.google.com to the machine-readable Internet Protocol (IP) address 74.125.113.147. With the proposed DNS Security changes, a website will be able to digitally sign their DNS record when publishing, thus when a user goes to a website like google.com, they can make sure that the DNS record was signed by google to assure the authenticity of the webpage before proceeding and signing into the page because a malicious entity could have caught the DNS request and instead of returning google’s IP, returned their own IP address to a website that looks like google but is not actually google. With SOPA and PIPA, when a website is blacklisted for copyright infringement, the ISP and other DNS providers in the US will be compelled to change the DNS records for the blacklisted websites from the correct and signed record either to a null-record or to a record that directs to a placeholder website that will say that the website was taken down due to copyright violations. Allowing this will make DNS Sec obsolete and make everyone less secure. In the weeks leading to the internet blackout, these DNS provisions were removed from the discussion, however, they were not removed permanently, they may be re-added at any time in the future, and possibly even without any changes. Even without the DNS provisions of SOPA and PIPA, they are bad laws.A technology progressed and computers, this including tape recorders, became more prevalent in people’s homes people started recording songs on the radio and creating mix tapes and sharing audio between friends. The recording industry was not happy because it was not getting money from these recordings. So, it lobbied congress and together they came up with the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (AHRA). The AHRA tried to define what were legal copies and what were not legal copies. Non-digital, analog copies, that were made for personal, non-commercial use were exempt from royalties paid to the recording industry. This greatly upset the recording industry; they decided that any copying of content should give them royalties. So, they lobbied congress again and this time, they got the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This time, any form of copying was illegal. Not only was everything illegal, they actually made it legal to go into your devices, the devices that you paid good money for and and break them. Break them so that if you have not paid your royalties, you would not be able to listen to the music, let alone make copies of it. It does grant an exception to fair-use. For example, if you were a teacher and wanted to show a clip of a work to talk about and discuss. The DMCA is still very flawed to this day but it has one redeeming feature: Due Process. For example, on youtube, if someone posts a video clip of some artist, the recording industry can then send take-down notice to youtube and thereby the person who uploaded the video. Then, the person who owns the video can go and send a counter-notice. For example, he could claim a fair-use exemption. SOPA and PIPA do not have due process. An entity could claim that a website infringes on their IP and the only time that the website could fight back was after his website was shutdown via the blacklist. Another thing that SOPA and PIPA want to do is the ability to get ad-networks and payment companies to annul their contracts with the website. Only after has this happened does a website even get a chance to say anything. The website cannot defend itself at the time of the original hearing about whether it was infringing. With the DMCA, at least, the website has a recourse before any action is taken.
The recording industry and the movie industry and still not happy, however, because piracy still happens. They compare piracy to stealing and saying that it hurts their business model and bottom-end. Piracy cannot be compared to stealing because when a person steals something, the person who was stolen from loses that item since there can only be one of that item. With piracy, in the digital age, everything is just bits and bits are infinitely copyable, disregarding bit-rot. The people proposing SOPA and PIPA say that it hurts their revenues but in fact there is no proof of this what-so-ever. If anything, all the proof points to the fact that piracy increases sales. But they are correct, piracy and the digital age are hurting their business model. So, they want SOPA and PIPA to protect their business model because they are too lazy to innovate and come up with a business model that works in this day and age. They want to go nuclear on pirates but in the end they will be hurting everyone. SOPA and PIPA are bad because they get rid of free speech. Instead of assuming innocent until proven guilty, as is the whole US Constitution based upon, it flips it around and wants to make people assumed guilty until proven innocent. It wants to make stream of infringing content a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison and fines of up to $2500 per stream. People like Justin Beiber who got their start by posting videos of themselves singing famous songs to youtube will be considered felons. SOPA and PIPA are just the first step, if they have their way, they will probably want more and more power and eventually there US will have it’s own Great Firewall.
The issue with SOPA and PIPA is not how bad piracy is and that it needs to be taken down. It is the fact that SOPA and PIPA will get rid of a lot of basic rights that are considered in the US available to everyone. Not only that but it assumes that people are guilty and until proven innocent. SOPA and PIPA also do not affect companies based inside the US, there already exists laws to take care of that. SOPA and PIPA will affect companies outside of the US. But how can the US control companies that are not US based? What rights does the US have to do that? Especially if in the country file sharing has been declared legal already?
SOPA and PIPA are dangerous to society. They are not the way to fight piracy. The internet fought back in the only way it knew how, by blacking out and trying to educate the masses, however, that will not work forever. The masses need to learn how to lobby congress. The recording and movie industries will keep pushing for SOPA and PIPA and things like it until there is an alternative. SOPA and PIPA will restrict free speech on the internet and that is bad for everyone.
Resourecs
- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-p...
- http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/even-without-dns-provisions-s...
- http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/08/judge-says-domain-name-loss-i...
- http://www.khanacademy.org/video/sopa-and-pipa?playlist=American+Civics
- http://www.ted.com/talks/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_ide...
- https://blacklist.eff.org
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOPA
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA
