PIPA & SOPA O My!
As the use of the Internet continues to grow, rules and regulations are being put into effect to keep it monitored. In this post, we discuss PIPA and SOPA, two laws currently being debated in the house and how these laws will affect your use of Internet. These laws are targeted at rogue websites in countries that are more acceptable of copy right infringement.
Protect IP Act (PIPA) – This law is targeted at domain name providers, financial companies, and ad networks and “will give U.S. corporations and the government the right to seek affirmative legal action with any website that they see as enabling copyright infringement weather of U.S. origin or not.” Streaming of unauthorized media will also be considered a felony and it will be the responsibility of the web publishers and host services to restrict their users from posting materials that infringe on copyrights.
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) – This bill would work with PIPA and would “allow the U.S. government and private corporations to create a blacklist of censored websites, and cut many more off from their ad networks and payment providers.” Essentially, this means that the government could restrict access to websites who are in violation of copy right infringement, as well as prevent search engines from linking to the site, and prevent payment services such as PayPal from conducting business with websites who are in violation.
Some big companies who support SOPA include: ABC, CBS, Comcast/NBC Universal, ESPN, Marvel Entertainment, MasterCard, National Football League, News Corp, Viacom and many others. These companies support the act because it is a way of stopping the piracy of movies and music from oversea sites. When movies and music are pirated, the companies lose money. In a 2010 interview, rapper Lupe Fiasco is stated as saying:
“At a bare minimum it costs me, literally out of my own pocket, it cost me $3,000 to $4,000 to make a song. It costs me about $700 to $800 to make a freestyle. I’m giving you that … Just imagine if I work with The Neptune’s, including studio time and everything that goes into it – flying people around – it gets up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a good song… … So to kinda see it on the Internet and, for some instances, for sale, who are you to have the right to tell me that I shouldn’t demand payment or feel a certain way for seeing people put my music out there like that? If I chose to do that, that’s one thing. But I didn’t choose to do that. That music was stolen” (The Boom Box).
Numerous tech companies have spoken out against SOPA including: Disqus, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, Rackspace, Reddit, Tumblr, Wikipedia, and many more. The reason that these companies oppose the presented SOPA bill is because they fear it could change the internet as we know it by introducing censorship of certain websites. The law would require Internet providers to monitor their users web traffic and block websites that are involved in copyright infringement.
GoDaddy.com originally showed support for the act, but when thousands of domains boycotted GoDaddy and transferred their domain to NameCheap, GoDaddy.com switched their stance and is now against SOPA.
Reddit has announced that on January 18th, they will temporary blackout their site for 12 hours and replace it with message about how SOPA could mean the end of user-generated content sites such as Reddit, Facebook, Youtube, and so forth. They will also be live streaming the House committee hearing on the SOPA bill. It is rumored that Wikipedia, Google, Twitter, and Facebook may join in; however when asked, Google and Twitter did not provide comments.
This is just a snapshot of some of the laws that are going into effect during 2012. Share your thoughts and comments on these laws, we’d love to know where you stand in regards to SOPA and PIPA.
To learn more on how these two laws can affect you, CLICK HERE.
