SOPA – Stop Online Piracy Act
PIPA – Protect Intellectual Property Act
Ask those active in the field of communications and the answer is simple – They are two bills that will undermine free speech, plain and simple.
But, ask regulators and they will tell you that both bills will protect our content from piracy.
What do the bills hope to accomplish?
The Stop Online Piracy Act, known as SOPA and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, known as PIPA, intend to prevent foreign-based websites from selling pirated movies, music and other products.
Currently, federal law enforcement has the authority to shut down any U.S.-based website that sells pirated content, but they cannot control the sale of pirated content from foreign sites.
In the spirit of full disclosure, both bills are backed by The Motion Picture Association of America, who claims that this illegal practice has cost them billions in lost revenue.
How can SOPA and PIPA stop piracy?
The bills hope to prevent U.S. companies from providing funding, advertising, links or other assistance to foreign sites. The bills would allow the Justice Department to prevent pirate sites from getting U.S. traffic and funding.
Going a step further, The Justice Department could seek a court order that would require U.S. Internet providers to block access to foreign pirate websites. Access could be blocked either by making it impossible for users to type a simple web address into an Internet browser or by requiring search engines like Google to disable links to the sites.
The bills would also allow Hollywood studios to take private legal action against websites that are alleged to be hosting pirated material.
So, does this affect my “free speech” rights?
According to a Wikipedia official, if passed, the bills could allow for “censorship without due process.” In other words, the “Government” could determine what content is “pirated” and prevent U.S. websites from displaying this content. This is a particularly thorny prospect for opponents of the bill including Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter, all of which depend heavily on content uploaded by users.
For instance, you conduct a search on Google, as you have hundreds of thousands of times in the past, and yielding pages of results. Sound familiar? Well, the difference here is that your “results” may look very different. The US government would now have the authority to ban sites suspected of intellectual property theft – piracy – from appearing in your search results.
The shining light of the entire controversy – The House has shelved the SOPA bill (for now) but the PIPA bill is still very much alive in the Senate.
What do you think? Will SOPA and PIPA prevent online piracy?
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