Regretsy, one of my favorite humor sites, might win the award for best Anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign for the scheduled 18 January blackout protests.
A satirical take on the intrusive SOPA/PIPA legislation.
An exaggeration of the SOPA/PIPA legislation? Barely. And that’s the scary part about this proposed legislation to censor the Internet.
I am a huge supporter of Intellectual Property Rights law. I believe that the United States does a poor job of upholding existing legislation and educating people on what IPR law is. Essentially, IPR refers to a series of laws protecting works of the mind. It’s easy enough to stop someone from stealing a television set from a department store. It’s much harder to stop someone from stealing a work of art.
How does this theft occur? Have you ever streamed a TV program off of an unlicensed site (essentially anything that isn’t the channel’s homepage, Hulu, or Netflix)? You broke IPR law. Have you ever downloaded a big Hollywood movie from a website? You broke IPR law. Did you ever find the perfect photo for your website, scrubbed away the watermark in Photoshop, and claimed it as your own? You broke IPR law.
Essentially, IPR laws are designed to protect creators of content the way larceny laws protect department stores from theft. Unfortunately, for a long time now, the government has been swayed by large entertainment companies to mutate the original intentions of IPR laws. Companies like Disney fought for an extension of the protection period when their earliest and most successful creations, like Mickey Mouse, were going to fall into the public domain.
Instead of allowing creative people to invent, design, and develop original ideas without the threat of them being stolen in their lifetime, IPR laws now protect corporate interests for at least 95 years after their work is originally published. That means the latest album from a manufactured pop act won’t fall into the public domain until long after most of us are dead; that is also, probably, long after anyone has any interest in using the material on the album for new work.
Apparently, outlasting all but the humans who reach the oldest age isn’t enough for large corporations like Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp or Apple. Now, they’re trying to strong-arm the US government into censoring the Internet.
Indeed, the US government should be doing more to battle online piracy. It’s a serious problem that helps no one. There is no way the quality of the programs is anywhere near their original broadcast or projected level when downloaded off of some backalley pirating site.
Instead of pressuring the government to do more, they’re pushing for legislation that could, effectively, kill any dissenting voices on the Internet. Here’s how SOPA/PIPA would actually work in two different examples.
1) Someone uploads Haywire to a website and encourages people to download the entire film. Relativity Media issues a take-down notice with the government and the person’s website is shut down through the server. A message appears on the website to anyone trying to visit it letting the visitor know the site has violated IPR law and has been shut down according to SOPA/PIPA. The site cannot go up again until the owner proves they are not in violation of IPR law.
2) Someone writes an unfavorable review of Haywire on their website. It goes viral. Relativity Media issues a take-down notice with the government claiming the writer is violating their IPR. The government shuts down the website through the server. A message appears to anyone visiting the website that the writer broke IPR law and the site has been shut down according to SOPA/PIPA. It is now the writer’s responsibility to prove they broke no IPR law in order to ever have their site restored.
The first example is what the supporters of the legislation says will happen. The second example is what will start to happen under the provisions of SOPA/PIPA. How?
Simple. SOPA/PIPA puts the burden of proof on the accused. The accusers only have to file paperwork claiming their is an IPR violation for a site to be shut down. They don’t have to prove anything. The violation could be a spambot posting a link to a piracy website, a commenter posting a stolen image in the comments section, an actual IPR violation by the site owner, or the crime of following fair use policies for negative commentary.
Fair use is not defined by the context of the use but the content. It is fair use to use a screengrab of a film or an excerpt of a novel in a review. It is not fair use to stream an entire album or upload an episode of a TV show to your website without permission.
Unfortunately, according to SOPA/PIPA, if you mention a copyrighted work, you could be shut down if the owner of the copyright doesn’t like your tone. I’ve been barred from free tickets for a production company’s Broadway shows because I wrote a negative review off of a free ticket. If SOPA/PIPA passes, I could be shut down for using the images they provided to me or even just mentioning the name of their show because they don’t like my review.
Forget about the world of bloggers for a moment. SOPA/PIPA will likely shut down sites that protesters in Internet-censored nations like China use to provide real information about government policies and protests to the world. SOPA/PIPA will shut down search engines for daring to include sites that might have IPR violations in their search engines. SOPA/PIPA will shut down Wikipedia for using images from political rallies and writing criticism of a political candidate.
SOPA/PIPA is not really about IPR law. It’s about controlling the spread of information. If you want to be able to freely discuss media, news, and events on the Internet, you have to contact your congressional representative and senator and tell them to stop supporting SOPA/PIPA. SOPA is on hold in Congress but PIPA is still being debated by the Senate. Both bodies are willing to change the language to skirt by or slap their choice legislation into something guaranteed to pass, like Medicare legislation or defense spending bills.
Unless you want to wake up to an Internet where you can’t access anything that isn’t PR spin, you need to take action against SOPA/PIPA.
