SOPA – Taking us back to the dark ages?
January 23rd, 2012 by Steffi
With over 7000 sites blacking out their services for the whole day on the 18/01/2012 I think it’s an appropriate time to take a look at the effects the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) will have on the web and future online innovation. Wikipedia’s English Language site in particular presented us with a dark page on ‘Blackout Wednesday’ with white text reading ‘Imagine a world without free knowledge’ as illustrated below.
Wikipedia Blackout
SOPA working together with PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) propose that anyone found guilty of streamlining copyrighted content without permission ten times or more within 6 months should go to jail. Furthermore, any site found enabling or facilitating piracy could be shut down. The acts will basically give more power to the American government to take down any site that it believes has copyright content regardless of who uploaded it which means that if the bills are passed, sites would have to closely monitor what exactly users are posting on their site.
If these new laws are to be granted the internet without doubt will not be the resource it once was, allowing people to share information openly and freely (that’s right, goodbye YouTube!)
On the other hand, the entertainment industry argues that the legislation is going to be a vital for protection in their battle against piracy accusing the likes of Wikipedia and Google of over exaggerating the impact that these laws will have.
But the question still remains whether these bills are badly written? Is SOPA being too irrational? With the internet being the ‘most powerful tool enabling us to create a more open connected world’ (Zuckerberg, 2012), will it be possible for anyone to do anything online without fear and apprehension?
Learn more about the issues discussed above and let your voice be heard http://www.netcoalition.com/sample-page/.
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I don’t believe SOPA will pass, but if ti does it’s bad, bad thing for freedom of speech.
Even if SOPA is passed, it will be very difficult to implement. Do doubt they will try to catch big names such as Google, Yahoo etc, to scare others away. But Google can point the blame to others and who can even blame to others until it goes to the poor guy who owns a website which is not meant for any kind of business but still has some copyrighted content. Is it going to work? I don’t think so. It’s like no more free information and again it will be like only rich can afford to gain knowledge.