Julie Kalmanides
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26 April, 2012
ENGL 1200-80
Project One
Professor Tetterton
Stop
Online Piracy Act or Stop Online Privacy Act?
Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA, was introduced by
Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) in an
effort to enhance law enforcements fight against online trafficking of
copyrighted material (Aaronson, ‘Texas’
Anti-Piracy Bill Gets Home State Pushback’).
The plan for SOPA is to stop websites from stealing movies and music, the two
most commonly torrented items on the Internet.
While the bills goal may have been noble,
its methods seem to do more harm than good, threatening to censor the internet,
which has been a beacon of freedom since its creation.
Proponents of SOPA argue that people work hard to produce the music, movies, Television
shows and other content people regularly pirate online, the way this bill
attempts to address this issue is wrong.
If this Bill is passed it will create an open-ended contract for the government
to censor more and take more of our freedom away.
The way the bill is formatted lets the government decide what should and should
not be censored without having to consider anyone else’s opinion.
SOPA will also diminish the workforce by closing down websites that they see as
illegal.
As if that wasn’t enough the Bill would also cause major companies to lose
large sums of money by forcing them to spend their money on website monitoring
to find illegal content. The
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sheer amount of work
that SOPA requires is just unfathomable.
Also this Bill would slow the internet down due to the monitoring that needed
to be done on every page with all of the content.
Even with all of these drawbacks legislators still push the Bill.
However, unlike most political bills SOPA has been highly publicized and, much
to the excitement of the bill’s detractors their campaign against the law has
gained a lot of momentum. This was particularly
apparent when on January 18th, 2012, Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, and
Reddit united in an online campaign against SOPA, voicing their disapproval of
the bill to their millions of users, with some sites even conducting a day long
blackout in protest. Beyond the interest of
these Internet giants, each and every Internet user should oppose SOPA given
the dangers it poses to their personal freedom online.
While SOPA supporters say the bill will create jobs, in reality it will
eliminate an entire division of our online workforce, by eliminating these
sites you are also getting rid of the
entire workforce behind them. In addition to
these issues, SOPA will also slow the internet down, as sifting through all
that information to determine what should be censored will take a very long
time.
Finally, how the law defines who will be responsible for using copyrighted
material unlawfully also seems unfair, SOPA will hold websites like YouTube and
Facebook responsible even if a handful of their users upload illegal content.
This will likely inhibit the ability of these platforms to provide their
services to users who use them for legitimate, legal activities such as
watching videos and movies or listening to music.
The SOPA bill would give the government the authority to
shut down any websites they find to be doing illegal activities.
It would also create an open ended contract, because there is no
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written point that says
where the censorship stops, thus would allowing the government to censor an
ever increasing amount of the internet.
While legislators make a good point about what the bill will abolish, they haven’t
necessarily thought through all of its consequences.
If we allow the government to censor the
internet, what’s next? Where does the invasion of our first amendment rights
end? What the American public fails to realize is that we need to be more
involved, we can’t let these legislators just push us around.
We need to assert our rights as citizens of the United States of America by
voicing our disproval of the Bill.
Proponents
of SOPA contend that jobs will be created by their efforts.
Legislators believe that once we give all the money back to these industries, which
have had a lot of their intellectual property stolen, they will use that money
to create jobs because they can. Additionally,
jobs will be created to help monitor what should and should not be censored.
In practice, this is unlikely the case.
If anything more jobs will be lost than created.
“The Internet accounted for 21 percent of GDP growth over the last five years
among the developed countries” (Pélissié du Rausas, Internet matters: The Net's sweeping impact on growth, jobs, and
prosperity). How can we deny that
amount of growth? The countless number of people needed to run these thousands
of websites does more for unemployment than our government can.
Legislators say the bill will return funds stolen from the music and film
industries, when, in reality, they could use this money for anything, they have
no contractual obligation to create more jobs.
Furthermore, most of the content monitoring can be done by computers, and while
this could create some job opportunities the jobs created just cannot replace
the ones lost.
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Major
corporations have also been united against the bill, pooling their collective
power to get their users to register their own protests against SOPA.
On January 18th, 2012, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Reddit all
hosted “blackouts” where they completely shut down their websites in protest of
SOPA, or publicly voiced their opposition to the bill.
Their efforts got people involved on a much larger scale than before.
Thankfully most Americans found this as important as it should be and took up arms;
the bill was even shelved after that day and will resume progress in May.
Many of these corporations oppose this bill on the basis that, even if only a
small number of millions of users upload illegal content, they could be held
responsible for all such uploads (Potter, ‘Wikipedia
blackout’ SOPA and PIPA explained). This would
create another set of cumbersome expenses for them, decreasing their
competitiveness in what is very global business.
Additionally, it is unfair to create numerous legal issues and impose
government fines on companies because of their users’ actions, which they
cannot control. We don’t think of large
corporations as being financially unstable, but with this Bill they could be
just that. If these companies had to monitor
all of their users that’s a large amount of their money going to an essentially
useless division. They would benefit
without this bill because all the money that would have gone to monitoring
users could now go to more important component of the company.
Furthermore, if websites like Google and Facebook were forced to monitor their
users they would have to report their findings back to the government, thus
creating even less privacy for users and less privacy on the Internet as a
whole.
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SOPA
would slow the Internet down, no matter how fast the connection is that you
have.
Ron Davis is a blogger who talks about the technological side of SOPA.
Davis’ political views are very conservative, in his statement below he just
presents factual information, nothing that could be persuaded by his political
views, he explains it like this “Many sites, large and small, use global server
load balancing (GSLB) and content distribution networks (CDNs) to make their
web sites faster. This is done with DNS
by answering users’ queries with IP addresses of servers geographically close
to them.
For instance, if a web site’s images are on a CDN, a user in Atlanta would want
to request those images from a server in Atlanta, rather than one in Los
Angeles.
GSLB and CDNs make this possible.
When users’ DNS is moved internationally (as mentioned above), the speedy
delivery service will break. For example,
users in Atlanta who request a site using a Toronto DNS server would get an IP
address of a server geographically close to Toronto instead of the optimal
Atlanta server’s IP address. The result is a
slower Internet browsing experience.”
(Davis, 8 Technological Reasons to Stop
SOPA and PIPA) For example, if someone wanted to do a simple Google search,
his/her search would have to go through a filter that would have to process all the information on the
internet to decide what is acceptable or unacceptable to show, and would be for
just for one person’s Google search.
Now imagine the millions upon millions of people who use the internet everyday all trying to do
the same thing. The result is an incredible strain
of the Internet’s resources that would slow down the ability of the search engine’s
to respond to their user’s needs.
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Another consequence to consider is the fact
that there are thousands of these websites on the internet.
Even if we can shut down the majority of the ones up today, who’s to say there
aren’t a hundred more up tomorrow? Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders
even stated “While I support their goal of reducing copyright infringement
(which I don’t believe these acts would accomplish)” (Potter, ‘Wikipedia Blackout’ SOPA and PIPA Explained).
The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of people in the world today
with the ability to create these sites.
Even with filters and blockers there are hackers learning ways around this.
People are already doing this today, it is still against the law today but
there are many people who want, and have the ability to go around the laws.
Another issue the bill does not address is what will happen to the people who
created the sites, this is another open end left up to the government to decide.
Furthermore, how will the government go about finding the culprits of these
crimes? Now the company that sold the man the domain name who uploaded a
pirated movie is in trouble for not monitoring their users.
Where does this vicious cycle end? Even if SOPA and PIPA were to become law,
the probability of abolishing all piracy on the internet is ludicrous.
Another argument with SOPA is if the government wants to eliminate all piracy
what about other outlets for pirated goods? There are many other pirated items
out in the United States other than on the Internet.
People are copying purses and clothes and selling pirated DVDs and CDs, and
still there is not action against these thieves as well.
The underlying issue here is that legislators
want more government control of the internet.
They can use the bill as a façade, but the fact of the matter is that most
American’s
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oppose this bill and
feel that the government is just trying to invade further into their personal
lives.
The White House even opposes it the U.S. Chief Technology officer and two
colleagues stated “While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a
serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not
support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity
risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”
(Potter, ‘Wikipedia Blackout’ SOPA and
PIPA Explained). There is almost no one
who wants to see this bill passed.
The only people who do are the music and film industries and legislators who
wish to line their pockets from it.
SOPA
is a bill with an admirable cause however, the way legislators are pursuing
this cause is wrong. The passing of SOPA
into law will take away our first amendment rights by allowing the government
to intervene in our lives, this bill could allow us to fall down a slippery
slope of censorship. Even if the bill were
to be passed there is nothing written that says where the government has to
stop.
The bill can also slow the internet to a turtles pace by having to filter
everything the internet has to offer to decide what is appropriate or not.
Additionally SOPA could also make unemployment skyrocket, by eliminating all of
these illegal websites they also diminish the workforce.
In addition, the bill will cause innocent companies to lose millions of dollars.
In addition to all of these causes SOPA just seems to be an unattainable goal.
The sheer magnitude of the task at hand is almost more than we can fathom.
Also there is no guarantee that SOPA will even be able to regulate the entirety
of the internet. There are countless
numbers of
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people willing and able
to go around the system. The cons of this act
out weigh the pros heavily, SOPA must be abolished.
