Breaking the ‘net

January 18, 2012 will be best remembered for the “blacking out of the web” as several of the core business of the Internet have either decided to blackout the site (e.g., reddit.com) or black out their logo (e.g., google.com). The focus of the outage has been the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA, the Protect IP Act of 2011 or PIPA and the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act or OPEN. The problem with all of these bills comes down to one repeating issues associated with piracy. An action designed to prevent piracy does little to stop the textbook definitions of piracy and does more to harm the everyday customers.

The RIAA and the MPAA are both championing these legislative acts as a way of protecting content creators. However, other laws were designed to stop piracy. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA reflected the changing nature of the cultural content and allowed for provisions that protected the content creators, the holders of copyright and most importantly, the public. These current series of proposed laws do not factor into the concept of public protection. There is no “fair use” defense allowed these new pieces of legislation. Also, the wording of both SOPA and PIPA are vague enough that a judge could rule that a comment posted on a site that links to any unauthorized piece of content would be grounds to shut down the entire site. The burden of complete moderation is forced upon the owners of the website to determine legal and illegal distributed pieces of content. This burden is different from the burden of censoring other forms of unlawful materials (e.g., types of hate speech and child pornography). This burden goes above and beyond the takedown notices that are already in place of most search engines and social networking sites.

Another critical point to note is that pirates could gain access to illegally downloaded content through proxies and directly typing in IP addresses. The ability to block direct access to sites like “Pirate Bay” and “LimeWire” does not prevent all access to these sites regardless of what legislation Congress passes. The fundamental roles of the Internet are to be redundant and provide multiple pathways for information to flow. Any attempt to change this essential function of the Internet would wreck the economic opportunities that are present online, would hurt the ability to transmit free speech and would essentially give control of the Internet to those powerful enough to have connections in the government or have enough money to pay off government official, which is what SOPA, PIPA, and OPEN hope to accomplish.