Websites including Wikipedia and Boing Boing are
being blacked out, and Google is hiding its logo behind a black rectangle. Tech
companies are in protest of SOPA, a bill which, they say, would censor the
internet.
SOPA has admirable goals, to stop online piracy in
the form of sites like The Pirate Bay. The MPAA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
and the Recording Industry Association of America support SOPA because it would
finally allow them to kill off rogue sites such as The Pirate Bay, which hosts
pirated, illegal content. International sites such as these, according to the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, threaten 19 million US jobs and have been compared to
child porn by Jim Hood, Attorney General of the U.S. state of
Mississippi.
Sites, which aggregate content, however, are protesting
the bill because they say the language in it is too murky, allowing for
censorship of the internet. The official opposition of SOPA, according to a November
15 letter to the House of Representatives, is Twitter, Google, Facebook,
LinkedIn, AOL, Mozilla, Yahoo, Mozilla, eBay, and Zynga.
Think of sites such as Google, Youtube, Facebook,
and Wikipedia as one massive library. Google allows you to search for pretty
much anything on the internet: a digital library. Youtube allows you to search
for millions of videos: almost like a TV channel. Facebook lets you browse
social content: a digital biography of you and your friends. Because these
sites see themselves as the middle-men between information and those who view
it, they are not pleased with a bill that would make them responsible for policing
content. Even though SOPA is aimed at getting rid of international sites which
infringe of copyrights, sites such as Google are worried because they could be
punished for pointing to an illegal site.
The internet depends on the sharing of information
and the sites which harbor that sharing could be made inaccessible after just
one link that points to a rogue site. Although companies like Google and
Facebook have the resources to police content, it’s something they’d rather not
have to worry about. More importantly, SOPA supporters say that anything
resembling the next Facebook, a site which depends on user generated content,
will not be created if SOPA is enacted. They say that if SOPA was enacted 10
years ago, Facebook would have never existed.
Whether or not SOPA, in its current form, gets
passed, is up in the air. Judging by the response from prominent websites, it’s
safe to say it has a very real chance of passing when then Senate form of the
bill (PIPA) will be up for vote on January 24th.
