_ By: Steven Coulombe
Major: Junior
Duluth, GA
“There is nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot” – Scott Adams

Is it just me or is there a lot of whistle blowing about this thing called SOPA?  Until a couple of days ago SOPA was this amorphous, ambiguous acronym that carried relatively no meaning for me.  Then Wikipedia went dark.  Luckily I didn’t have any research that needed to be done or else there would have been real issues.  (Note: to all of my professors this is a joke).  So for those of you that were like me and don’t really know the implications of SOPA this blog is for you.  I will briefly outline the SOPA legislation and the main areas of contention within the bill.  Finally, I will attempt to explain the effect SOPA will have on you, the everyday Internet user, if it is enacted.

_ SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, was proposed by Republican Congressman Lamar Smith in October of 2011. In the most basic terms SOPA aims to fight online trafficking of copyrighted material and counterfeited (pirated) goods.  The ultimate goal is to protect the intellectual property of people and ensure the continued production of novel or unique works.  Policing the endeavor would fall upon the U.S. attorney general who would be responsible in identifying offending websites and issuing a removal order.  Again “offending” websites are those that are publishing copyrighted content without proper permission.  These targeted “rouge websites” as they have been called are not limited to the United States.  As the Internet is worldwide this new bill would cover the removal of all rouge websites based in and out of the United States.

Once a rouge website has been targeted and labeled as such – the rules are not absolutely clear on what is considered as substantial copyright infringement – then those particular websites are stricken from the Domain Name System.  What the Domain Name System does is convert what the computer recognizes as a website into language that we, average English speakers, can read and identify.  This would mean that for that specific website you would no longer be able to search for or find that website using keywords.  The website still exists but to call upon it you would have to speak computer.  This would – for all purposes – effectively kill that webpage and most (if not all) traffic to that page.

The actual execution of this bill lies more in the hands of Internet service providers like Google and Yahoo.  Here lies one of the grievances against the bill.  SOPA dictates that “A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States…”  The problem a lot of Internet companies have with this is that they are inheriting a potentially expensive and time consuming endeavor.  But, they claim, even more so that they would be responsible for policing their own users – their own contributors – the people that add to and make their sites worthwhile. 

This is the main crux of the argument against SOPA: that with all these regulations in place to salvage copyrights that it will actually limit the amount of creativity on the Web and may in fact limit the right for people to exercise their First Amendment to free speech.  For example, the next YouTube video that parodies an NFL game or a CNN report without permission runs the risk of violating copyrights and without judicial monitoring of their site YouTube could potentially be shutdown.  That would mean that all the videos that complied with SOPA’s copyright laws would be shutdown too – a loss of unique and novel works.  Sharing too is such a prevalent concept to the Internet and it runs the risk of being axed.  So sharing your Stumbleupon videos and photos on Facebook may have to be stopped.    

Now I’m not saying that if SOPA does pass YouTube and all your favorite blog sites will be shut down – in fact it’s a worst case scenario, but there is a risk based upon the ambiguous phrasing of what is and what isn’t a substantial copyright infringement. 

As of Friday the SOPA legislation has been recalled, but bloggers and Internet corporations advise constant vigilance. 

 

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