SOPA and PIPA
One thing that my father always said was, “don’t risk losing the friendship of the people you do business with, over talking politics”.
However, with SOPA and “PIPA” looming on the political landscape, we have, stomping around among us, two, four thousand pound gorillas, poised and ready to break anything and everything we come to love about the internet. Therefore, it’s becoming expected that anyone who works, or spends time online, share their opinions on the subject.
To be honest the conversation cannot be framed as a traditional political debate. There has been so much money lavished on both parties to support these two insidious bills, that it has become truly bipartisan and non-denominational!
How big are these gorillas, and how big of a threat are they to the Internet, as we know it?
Let me start by doing something we don’t usually do, and direct you to outside links to read, before you continue reading the rest of this post.
Google, Facebook, Amazon May Go Black in SOPA Protest OS News
SOPA: What if Google, Facebook and Twitter Went Offline in Protest? Time
SOPA opponents may go nuclear and other 2012 predictions CNET
While it is a huge story, you may not have heard much about SOPA or PIPA on the evening news because many of the major news outlets would like to see these bills silently passed.
However, if either of these bills passed, it will go down in the history books as one of the worst blows to democracy and the democratization of information in our era.
Sadly, many of the same tools that people used to rise up in Libya against oppression will become illegal for American citizens to use, if these two bills are passed.
Congress has planned to vote on these bills when they reconvene in late January and therefore the time to take action is now, if we hope to dissuade Congress from passing them.
This will take a coordinated effort to educate and motivate the masses, into putting pressure on elected officials and corporations who support SOPA and PIPA and get them to change their minds while we still have the tools available.
This is already happening with some success!
Thanks mostly to the reddit.com community, just in the past few weeks GoDaddy, was forced to reconsider its support of SOPA due to an online boycott, which caused them to lose over 70,000 accounts.
The result – GoDaddy has now publicly pulled its support of SOPA!
However, the battle is not over!
The GoDaddy case, and other SOPA related battles have sadly gone under-reported, by television news programs, and few people outside of the most web savvy, understand what is truly at stake. In part, this is because the large television news organizations are supporting SOPA and PIPA, because they see SOPA and PIPA as a way to regain a monopoly on news and information which they enjoyed before the competition of the Internet.
Don’t underestimate the money and power which is at stake, for the spoils will be huge for anyone who can control information, if they can pull this off.
Money and power is what these two bills are about.
So, what exactly is SOPA and PIPA?
SOPA is the acronym for Stop Online Pirating Act or H.R. 3261 and “PIPA” is short for the Protect IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) or S. 968.
Like the Patriot act, on the surface, the names of the bills and concept of protecting copyrighted material sounds gallant, however these acts have a more sinister side.
As in the case of the Patriot act, it seems that many of our congressional representatives have not had the time to read, or to consider the implications of these bills before feeling obliged to “get on board”.
At present, both bills have some bipartisan support and a LOT OF MONEY is being thrown around to BUY even more political support.
Those of us against these bills, have our work cut out for us, educating the masses and building a formidable resistance against pro SOPA and PIPA lobbyists who have already out spent us by millions.
~theguardian
The more you learn about SOPA and PIPA the more I’m sure you’ll hate them, so I encourage you to research these bills on your own.
We need to educate, congress, our fellow citizens, and ourselves about what is at stake.
Even if you don’t live in the United States you’ll want to follow how this battle shakes out, because if a special interest group can push something like SOPA or PIPA through here, then it spells disaster for other peoples who hold the democratization of information and a free Internet in high esteem.
Why would anyone support SOPA and PIPA?
The benefactors of these two bills would be a small handful of established media corporations and anyone inside the government who would enjoy the ability to toss about McCarthyism style accusations. It would allow such accusations against their competitors to cause real and tangible harm without due process or a trial.
Under SOPA and PIPA those targeted by their accusers would be censured, stripped of income, blocked and blacklisted without due process or being offered a fair trial.
In effect, these laws turn on its head the concept of innocent until proven guilty and would direct punitive measures against the accused within as little as five days of an accusation.
Basically, this is a no win situation for the accused, unless they have the resources to fight their accusers, which has been further exasperated due to the fact their incomes will be stripped away until they can prove their innocence.
Not only will this cause entrepreneurial innovation and free speech to be stifled, if these two acts become law, the American taxpayer will be required to spend millions enforcing them, for big business, at a time when the American taxpayer can least afford it!
Will SOPA and PIPA stop the pirating of copyright protected material?
Hackers are already bragging online how they will circumvent SOPA and PIPA. In fact, they will not stop the pirating of copyright protected material at all, and instead just moves pirating off shore where it becomes only marginally more difficult for the enterprising pirate.
Instead, at its core, this is about the media giants and a McCarthyism type element from inside our own government attempting to build the legal leverage necessary to monopolize information by setting up nearly unattainable goals, requiring site owners to be responsible for every element of user generated content.
Strangely, many companies would be required to pry into their customer’s personal information, using deep packet spying techniques that up until now, have always been considered illegal and unethical just to comply with these new proposed legislations.
This is no cure for online shoplifting!
Regardless of whether or not you believe that these two laws could ever be as devastatingly destructive as we have been trying to persuade you to believe, please consider this…
Simon and I can disagree with the concept of SOPA and PIPA simply on the grounds that as business owners who create copyright protected content for the online community, we find that the current system, as it is, already works fine!
It’s true that we do have some of our content stolen from time-to-time by unsavory elements on the web, which is costly and unfortunate for us; but, we are still able to provide our services at competitive prices, and we still can make a profit regardless of the occasional theft of our own property.
As far as we can see, this proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation gives you or us, no better tools to thwart the piracy of our material other than what is already in existence.
In fact, it may make things a whole lot worse!
For example, if both the UK and the US passed laws similar to SOPA and PIPA, as they stand, we may find that it’s illegal for us to visit foreign websites known for pirating from within our own boarders just to check and see if they are distributing our copyright protected intellectual property!
How crazy is that?
Here, is what Sergey Brin cofounder of Google had to say about SOPA and PIPA,
https://plus.google.com/u/0/109813896768294978296/posts/Dt6FoRv6hXJ
“I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.”
That says a lot, coming from someone within Google who has had the experience of working behind the red curtain in China, Lybia, and other places around the globe renown for squashing free speech and for human rights violations!
Below, we have reprinted a bone-chilling open letter signed by many of the founders and co-founders of websites and web services that we all use on a daily basis and have depended upon in business and in daily life.
Like us, you may owe this group who sponsored this letter a debt of gratitude for creating the social media websites and Internet infrastructure and web services that has made your business possible and your life more enjoyable!
Please, read this open letter and consider, reprinting it and signing it as we have.
We encourage you to help us keep the Internet a free and vibrant place to discover information and do business.
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An Open Letter to Washington
We’ve all had the good fortune to found Internet companies and nonprofits in a regulatory climate that promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, the creation of content and free expression online.
However we’re worried that the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act — which started out as well-meaning efforts to control piracy online — will undermine that framework.
These two pieces of legislation threaten to:
- Require web services, like the ones we helped found, to monitor what users link to, or upload. This would have a chilling effect on innovation;
- Deny website owners the right to due process of law;
- Give the U.S. Government the power to censor the web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran; and
- Undermine security online by changing the basic structure of the Internet.
We urge Congress to think hard before changing the regulation that underpins the Internet. Let’s not deny the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders the same opportunities that we all had.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch
David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post
Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and co-founder of Alexa Internet
Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal
Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist
Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
Biz Stone, co-founder of Obvious and Twitter
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation
Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter
Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!
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We’d like to add our names to this list
Simon Hodgkinson founder of Hodgkinson Publishing and
Jeremy Gislason founder of SureFireWealth Inc
Please join us by reprinting this open letter and adding your name to the list, as well!
Join us in spreading the word, and in putting pressure on politicians and corporations that support SOPA and PIPA in their current forms!
Remember, Congress will be reconvening this month and will make their decision, so we don’t have much time to act!
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