SOPA

The Stop Online Piracy Act is generating quite a fuss today. Wikipedia and others have taken it upon themselves to openly demonstrate this piece of legislation over the next 24 hours by blacking out completely.

If you are a busy person without the time to properly study the bill and reflect upon it, the short version is that it simply removes official judges from the equation of shutting down supposed pirate bays online. If the bill is passed lawyers employed by an entertainer (or the industry) can petition the FBI to have a certain site or sites shut down without notice, if they display over 16 seconds of copy righted material. It used to be that sites were safe so long as they just did not host the content but merely linked to it. That will end with SOPA. Any individual forwarding copy righted content will face up to 5 years in jail in the US, if it is not a first offense.
Basically this means that the entertainment industry, who can afford the lawyers needed to perform this legal move, will recieve a fully authorised red button they can push whenever they want and use FBI resources to check any site they suspect for infringement.

Your favorite media sites like Facebook and YouTube will face problems with this bill as well. Just think of how many songs or videos with clips from copy righted material you have seen since you joined those communities. There will most definitely be a huge reworking of how those sites work. It could be the next step for them to inform you that you are held legally responsible for anything you link to on your profile (or perhaps that others link to on your profile).

The list of items that raises issues in this bill is quite extensive, but the online community has to remain vigilant. As the first article I linked to states this bill may have been made overly aggressive so they can make a similar one that, by comparison, will not look as bad. This is the true fight for free speach. Recently a very hot topic in my country, Denmark. You may remember the cartoons and the ensuing debate. Any compromise is still compromise, no matter how you look at it.

At the moment we are putting up with monitored just about everywhere we go online. This should be the apex of what they achieve. It really should. Make no mistake, this is a tool for the elite. It allows the industries to maim smaller businesses and persons, first of all because they did the lobbying for this bill and so has inspired quite a lot of what is in it, second of all because legal action is rarely a service rendered by the people at the bottom. Like I said it is a big red button in the big office.

If you view this from another perspective you might draw attention to the fact that studies have been done on how censoring, even on a small scale, affects the online community. Eli Pariser draws a verbal canvas of the situation in this presentation, where he talks of how the social media sites have already started filtering content to stream line your intake of their service.