Another new
year has passed and now we’re 2012, the time goes by fast.
This month I would like to talk about something rather scary that happened early this January. It’s called SOPA (short for Stop Online Piracy Act). This was a new kind of law made to stop online piracy and failed to pass the votes a few weeks ago. Now you may have noticed things happening around the internet, like Wikipedia “shutting down” one day, the Google logo getting a big black bar in front of it and (for those who know what 4chan is) 4chan ‘censoring’ all text on their website with black bars as well. All these occurrences were protests against SOPA. Now why would we want to protest against something that would protect the content that musicians, moviemakers, game makers, etc. against piracy (downloading illegally from the internet)?
This month I would like to talk about something rather scary that happened early this January. It’s called SOPA (short for Stop Online Piracy Act). This was a new kind of law made to stop online piracy and failed to pass the votes a few weeks ago. Now you may have noticed things happening around the internet, like Wikipedia “shutting down” one day, the Google logo getting a big black bar in front of it and (for those who know what 4chan is) 4chan ‘censoring’ all text on their website with black bars as well. All these occurrences were protests against SOPA. Now why would we want to protest against something that would protect the content that musicians, moviemakers, game makers, etc. against piracy (downloading illegally from the internet)?
Well this
bill happened to be very poorly written and would allow big companies to
basically shut down any site they think are harmful for their content. An
example is, if you would post a video on YouTube showing how to download a
certain thing from the internet, illegally or not, YouTube itself is
responsible for the videos ‘you’ post and will be shut down. If these companies
find out you’re googling ways to download this certain movie you’d like to have
free, Google shuts down. If these companies see you drew a copywriter character
because you’re a big fan of him, that website will shut down. People who work
for YouTube and other sites will lose their jobs basically because their jobs
involve using these kind of content. Independent game developers (which I
talked about in my Dutch post for this month) wouldn’t exist.
This bill was so poorly written that companies could take over the internet and there would be no more freedom.
This bill was so poorly written that companies could take over the internet and there would be no more freedom.
Though the
bill is for the American law it could certainly affect us here in Belgium
because the servers running these big websites are located in the USA. So if
the servers would (for example) be moved to Belgium, they might not be affected
by this bill. But if the bill would’ve been successful, it wouldn’t take long
for it to travel all the way to different countries.
Now, I said
that this bill didn’t pass the votes but they’re making new bills that are
written poorly or even worse than SOPA. For example PIPA (Protect IP Act) and
ACTA . The entire internet, big websites are opposing these bills and you
should support as well.
Imagine how the internet would be if not for your favorite things. I find it
scary to see people not noticing that the internet might be totally different
and we basically would downgrade in communicative technology and the freedom of
speech and art.
Sources:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
- http://sopastrike.com/
- General knowledge about SOPA
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