Opinion: SOPA and PIPA: Mandates for censorship?
By Ricardo A. Sánchez, Gavel Media Staff, on February 20, 2012 5:08 PMBefore January 18, 2012, little was known about the proposed legislation sitting in both houses of Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and its nearly identical twin in the Senate, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). However, on January 18, anyone attempting to access the English version of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, would have been greeted by a dark, gloomy page with the headline: “Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge.” Many other popular websites such as Reddit participated in a coordinated blackout of their sites, in protest of the SOPA and PIPA bills. Google blacked out its logo for American users. After that, nearly every internet-user in America knew about SOPA and PIPA.
As their names imply, the goal of the bills is to expand the ability of the United States government to fight the online trafficking of copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. The bill mainly targets foreign websites, which are out of the jurisdiction of U.S. law. If passed, the bills would authorize copyright holders to request court orders to block advertising networks and payment companies from doing business with infringing websites. The bill would allow the government to block search engines from linking to those sites, and would even go so far as requiring Internet service providers to block access to those sites entirely. The bill would also expand current criminal laws to include unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
Now, as college student at the end of my teen years, I certainly enjoy “free stuff;” but I am not here to make an argument in favor of pirating copyrighted content. If any of the above provisions of SOPA and PIPA sound extreme, it’s because they are. SOPA and PIPA are dangerous for many different reasons. If you don’t believe me, just ask their other opponents: Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Mozilla Corp., to name a few. The problem with SOPA and PIPA is that they are just too broad, and would have many unintended, yet harmful, consequences.
Among these is the problem of censorship. Unlike many repressive regimes around the world, the United States has never been one to tell its citizens what they can or cannot look at online. However, under SOPA, entire Internet domains could be shut down if even a single blog or website contained infringing content. This means that many websites could be thrust into expensive legal battles just to keep their websites alive when they have done nothing wrong. As written in a recent TIME magazine article, sites such as YouTube or Facebook would face the burden of finding new ways to monitor their users’ activities “or risk legal action because a few teenage girls posted a video of themselves bopping around to a copyrighted Katy Perry song.” Enabling the government to shut down entire domains over something so petty is nothing short of censorship, and would certainly put threaten our freedom of speech. Just imagine how easily the government would be able to censor websites that also contain, say, dissenting political opinions? This is the United States of America—a free and open society—not China. If SOPA or PIPA were to become law, what sort of example would we be setting for the rest of the world?
It would be wrong to ignore the glaring problem of copyright theft. The music and film industries, the primary backers of the SOPA and PIPA bills, have indeed lost millions as a result. However, their grossly hyperbolized economic losses aren’t nearly enough to allow the government to mess around with Google’s search results. There would surely be many new costs that come from so many restrictions and regulations on our otherwise free and open internet.
To pass SOPA and PIPA would be very dangerous and ill advised. The bills would give the government unprecedented power to regulate what the we see and post online, threatening our First Amendment rights to free speech. Perhaps more worrisome is the manner in which the bills came to be. The music and film industries, with their powerful lobbying groups, drew up the bills without considering the opinions of those they would affect the most: the online community. The smarter—and more democratic—thing to do would be to give the online audience more of a say in drafting the bills. After all, what better platform is there to gather ideas and opinions than the internet itself?
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I believe that consumers should have access to a vibrant and innovative online community to discuss their ideas and opinions. At the same time, we must not let the internet become a haven for intellectual property thieves.
The threat to intellectual property owners over the internet is clear. Every year, the US Chamber of Commerce estimates that copyright theft costs our nation about $58 billion in lost output, 373,375 in lost jobs, and $16 billion in lost employee earnings. These numbers present an unacceptable burden to US businesses. In addition, companies may be less likely to innovate because their products may be stolen by intellectual property pirates, creating a drag on the US economy.
The PROTECT IP Act addresses the problem of intellectual property theft online, but it also contains important due process protections to ensure that legal activity over the internet is not disrupted. As you may know, the PROTECT IP Act would allow the Department of Justice to file a claim against a website that 1) has no significant purpose other than engaging in or facilitating copyright infringement, circumventing technology controlling access to copyrighted works, or selling or promoting counterfeit goods or services; or (2) is designed, operated, or marketed and used to engage in such activities. A judge would have to find that a website is intentionally violating intellectual property rights of an American entity before he could issue an order against that site. I believe PROTECT IP Act would provide law enforcement and intellectual property holders additional tools to protect American intellectual property from websites while still ensuring the constitutionally protected rights of free speech and due process. The PROTECT IP Act currently is awaiting action on the floor of the Senate, and I will continue to monitor this bill as it moves through the Senate.