By Jocelyn Cote
Staff writer
What would happen if this was commonplace on the Internet?
Many government officials and Hollywood head honchos have been chasing after pirated media for as long as the Internet has been available to the public. Multiple House and Senate bills have been proposed (and have failed) over the years, but their newest effort, the Stop Online Piracy Act (abbreviated as SOPA), is by far the most strict proposal yet.
The main goal of SOPA is “to promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.” This House bill was proposed by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas on October 26th, 2011. Under this act, websites with user-created content such as Facebook and Twitter will be responsible for making sure that everything users post does not contain any sort of copyrighted material.
Sites like Flickr and Vimeo could potentially shut down under this bill. YouTube could possibly remain safe, as it is continually combating users posting copyrighted content by removing their videos and closing their accounts.
Under SOPA, search engines will also be responsible for preventing links to sites containing copyrighted materials.
A major goal of the bill is to be able to take legal action of “foreign rogue sites,” which its term for sites outside of the US’s jurisdiction that infringe on copyright. Under Title I of the bill, the US Attorney-General can legally take action against these websites and force US-based websites that contain advertising to stop doing business with these sites.
Title II of the bill makes unauthorized streaming of any copyrighted material a felony.
To protest SOPA, many websites declared November 16th “American Censorship Day”. Many websites, such as social networking sites Tumblr and Reddit, displayed black banners over their site logos with the words ‘stop censorship’ in bold lettering to show their distaste for the bill.
As someone who spends a bit too much time browsing social websites, I am unhappy about this bill. I’m against illegally downloading media, and always try to make sure musicians, actors, directors, and everyone else who contributes to the ever-growing world of media gets compensated for their work that they put so much time and effort into. However, SOPA is far from a rational way to do this.
Personally, I think SOPA is borderline infringement on our right of freedom of speech. Many people mean no harm in putting a background track over their video of a baby doing a silly dance or of their daughter performing ballet to a copyrighted piano composition. Should these innocent people be convicted of a felony for doing this? I surely think not.
The bill has certainly been a hot topic on the Internet for the past few days. It really has gotten everyone thinking: what would we do if something like SOPA were to be put in place?
Oh SOPA, I have been fighting you since the day that you were created several months ago. I have sent countless letters to state representatives and they refuse to hear my cry. We would have censorship like China. Also, this bill would take so many people out of business. Gamers that perform Let’s Play’s on youtube would be completely shutdown.(games are copyrighted material) So big names like, machinima, yogscast, and paperbatvg would all be convicted as felons simply for putting up videos of them playing their favorite games. A video of your best friend singing a song by their favorite artist would have your friend doing jail time. This bill has very good intentions but it written much too vaguely, and is putting too many innocent people inside of its area of effect. It needs to be rejected and rewritten so that it only targets the people that are DISTRIBUTING copyrighted materials. Sites like , the pirate bay, mediafire, and kicka$$ torrents need to be shutdown because they are the real criminals here. They are the ones distributing songs, movies, and computer applications costing over $100 a piece. This is why we need younger politicians who actually understand the repercussions of not wording things a certain way to get the desired result.