The Web Goes On Strike

By Eye Magazine published 23 January, 2012 No Comments

On the 18th January the internet saw the largest online protest in history, in efforts to stop the internet censorship bills, SOPA & PIPA. Sites from all over the world striked in different ways, but they are united by this.

The US Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed to PIPA to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity.

PIPA, Protect IP Act, will give the power to censer the internet to the private corporations including entertainment industry. These private corporations want the ability to shut down unauthorised sites where users have the ability to download music, movies and TV shows. However as many of these site are hosted outside the US and fall outside the US jurisdiction, the PIPA bill, will give private corporations and the government a few different enforcement tactics within the US boarders.

Firstly, it will give the power to the US government to enforce that US internet providers block infringing domain names, and the ability to sue and block foreign and US based search engines, blogs, forums and social media sites (like Facebook) for simple having one link to any infringing site, even if this link is posted by a user. Ordinary users, like you and me, could even go to jail for up to five years for posting copyrighted work – even just singing a pop song and posting to Youtube.

Secondly is the ability to cut of funding to the infringing sites and social media sites linking to infringing sites until a time the links are removed.

In a nut shell this is what the PIPA bill will try to do but in all likely hood it will do something else all together. For starters it wont stop internet users from downloading copywrited material. Blocked sites will still be able to be access by simple entering the sites IP address rather than the domain name. What it will do is cripple new start ups like search engines and new social media sites because it will allow private corporations to sue any site they feel is not filtering there content enough. The PIPA bill is also worded in a way that even the important social media sites like Tumbler, SoundCloud and Youtube could look like pirates to the wrong judge.

So what does this mean to us? Even though this bill will only effect the US, many of the site you use today are hosted in the US and fall under US law, meaning many of the site you use could soon become censured. This law could soon then be passed by our government or other countries. Even if you trust our government not to abuse these new powers what about over countries from around the world and private corporations?

Corporation already have tool to fight piracy like the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 2007 PRO-IP Act, 2011 Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement which gives them the power to takedown and remove content from sites, sue pear two pear website (like Napster) out of existence and even sue journalists for even talking about how to copy a DVD. There is a history of the entertainment industry stretching and abusing there powers, they tried to take down a video on Youtube of a baby dancing due to the music playing in the background, they have used legal penalties written for large scale commercial piracy to go after families and children, they even sued against the VCR and MP3 players.

The question is how far will they take this? This is the reasoning behind the online protest to physical protest against these new bills.