New Threats to the Internet: SOPA and PIPA

With the news of the Occupy movements dying down, people have time to focus their attention on issues that may be more relevant to their lives. SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill that originated in the United States. The goal of this bill is in its name, to stop online piracy. The major concern that I have with this bill is the same that others have been expressing; the censoring of the internet. In today’s day and age, people rely on the internet as their main source of information, news, entertainment and communication. SOPA will interfere with people’s ability to download music, movies, TV shows, e-books and other copyrighted forms of media. The bill will also impede on people’s being able to stream things online.

The main argument for this bill is that it will help to protect authors and artists from having their work plagiarized and essentially stolen.  SOPA is being paired with PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, to hinder people’s access to websites that are involved in copyright infringement. Included in the targets of SOPA and PIPA are any websites from which free downloads are made possible. However, the government does reserve the right to block any other websites that provide information on how to work around the censorship being put into place.

 I, like many others opposing SOPA and PIPA, am not looking forward to the diminishing integrity of the internet. We have become so accustomed to a certain manner of streaming, downloading and uploading over the internet, that the threat of having our rights taken away seem too shocking to process.

The question people are posing is that if the government can come up with a way to censor websites from which people download and stream media, how long until they interfere with other aspects of the internet? Censorship, in any manner of speaking, has a negative connotation. People are arguing that it is an infringement of their right to free speech and freedom of expression.

I’m sure that people are aware of the blackouts that Wikipedia and other websites like Reddit participated in a few days ago. For those people who don’t know, the whole point of the internet blackouts was to protest against SOPA and PIPA. Since then, the popular video streaming medium that we all know and love, Megaupload, has been shut down. Many of my friends expressed genuine dissatisfaction to the removal of the website, and as a result have built more anger towards the government’s new policies. After the protests held by various websites, SOPA and PIPA had apparently lost many of their supporters.  

Although SOPA and PIPA had originated in the United States, they are affecting people all around the world. The censorship of websites includes those all over the internet. Megaupload itself was not based in the United States, but Hong Kong. It is not just Americans who must be concerned about the acts that are threatening the internet, but people all around the world. There is a provision to the Canadian copyright bill in the process of being made that gives the Canadian government the authority to block pirating websites in order to “protect the Canadian marketplace”.

In my opinion, SOPA, PIPA and other forms of legislation alike, pose the risk of us losing the integrity of the internet, a source that we have become so dependent on. I don’t think it’s over. The blackout protests that those many websites participated in definitely raised awareness, but something more needs to be done to protect our online community.