Not With The Band: SOPA

Wikipedia Wiklipedia and many other sites went dark on Wednesday to protest SOPA, the anti-piracy bill. It took me by surprise as I had no exactidea what was SOPA till this past week. The Stop Online Piracy Act wasintroduced last October, thanks (among others) to Republican Lamar Smith, and wasmaking its way to the Congress, as its counterpart PIPA to the Senate.

These bills want to regulate the internet and basically shutdown sites (using diverse methods) that torrent movies or music that they obviously don’t have the copyrights to distribute. Google or Paypal, or any site that receive the notice that a site has infringed on its content, would have only five days to block it and stop the US traffic. 

Thus, on behalf of intellectual property, this would create a blacklist, and from this, there would be no limit. The whole internet is connected, if you visit one of these sharing file sites, and post the link on Facebook or Twitter for example, these social media would have to remove it, or … be shutdown too. Do you realize the implications? Someone rightly said that the next social network could absolutely not emerge from this mess. 

But you may say that torrent sites are bad as they are thieves who violate intellectual property, and that you never visit them. Sure but it goes much further. What about all the videos and pictures people upload on line? How many of them trespass copyright? I bet a lot.

Personally, all the videos I have uploaded do, since I film bands live. 99.9% of the musicians are happy to see these videos and actually thank me (I just had one out of hundreds who ask me to remove the videos) but I certainly infringe on copyrights, like tons of videos uploaded on YouTube. I know that the site has posted this warning: ‘Do not upload any TV shows, music videos, music concerts or advertisements without permission, unless they consist entirely of content that you created yourself’, but despite this, you can find videos of any concert that has ever happened in the past few years.

With SOPA, they would all disappear, and since most of them are reposted on any blog, facebook page, the consequences would be huge. ‘YouTube would cease to function if laws such as the proposed SOPA were passed’ said Google’s director of public policy. Of course,all the blogs posting mp3s would be gone too.  

And the worst part of this is that sites that clearly violate copyrights do not even feel threatened! The people behind the populart orrent site, The Pirate Bay, for example, don’t believe the laws will do much to stop them, as the site and its users have always found ways to go around technical measures put in use to block them. Then if SOPA cannot stop them, it would really be useless!

It is an awful bill, which would create mayhem on the internet, censoring creativity and liberty, and going after the pointless while failing stopping the big guys. Even Obama has said he would not support the bill, we have to stop it or any of its future re-worked version.
http://americancensorship.org/