SOPA and PIPA

SOPA and PIPA: Like a deranged aunt and uncle.

The grand ole' Uny'ed Staydes Of ‘Mericah (as Bush used to say) is roughly 13,000 kilometers away from New Zealand. It's been years since this author has been there, but it took roughly half of a flight to London before arriving at LAX, where I was  unrelentingly exposed to the sheer gluttony of American airport terminals (is it really possible to have so many fast food restaurants in such a small space?), but that is another matter entirely.

The internet, as wonderful and extravagant and bizarre as it is, bridges that distance with such little effort. This author's mind still boggles when trying to contemplate the true freedom of expression that the World Wide Web provides.

No doubt you, dear reader, will have read about, heard, or experienced for yourself the complete and almost-all-encompassing blackout of the English language version of Wikipedia.

If you haven't - go there now.

Some of the few articles still available to view are on the topics of SOPA - or the Stop Online Piracy Act - and PIPA - or Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act - and it is from these that this author paraphrases their definitions.

SOPA  grants immunity (total and utter, under the law) to any copyright holder so that they may file a court order against any website they consider to be a infringing on copyright. This would require advertisers and payment facilitators to halt business with the ‘infringing' site, bar search engines from allowing access to it, and would require internet service providers to pull it down altogether.

PIPA ties in to the aforementioned bill essentially as a tool. It would enable a U.S. court to order any search engine to remove any links to an infringing website. PIPA specifically relates to the use of domain name servers (DNS), and any internet sites "associated with the domain name".

The depth, breadth, scope, and license these two laws give to private companies is truly amazing.

Well hold on, you say. We're in New Zealand. This shouldn't matter an inch.

Right?

Right, guys?

Here's where the distance comes in.

SOPA and PIPA, when working effectively, could halt access, traffic, and business going through any site private company deems to be "dedicated to theft of US property". In order to monitor such infringements, those enforcing the laws would need to be in a state of constant monitoring of any and all sites they have suspicions over.

That means monitoring you.

The truly, truly frightening aspect of these laws is the sheer indeterminacy of its wording. It is so loosely defined that, in theory, that self same court order, one that acts as judge, jury, and executioner, can call a halt to any site seen to be "facilitating the activities" of copyright infringement.

To put this in the context - the United States is home to the largest hosts of user-generated material in the world. That means Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, Imgur, Twitter, and Flickr and the list can go on forever.  If one single prominent-enough copyrighted image made its way across all of these aforementioned sites, then SOPA and PIPA can, in theory, block access to all of them.

There's little doubt that PIPA and SOPA transgress the First Amendment to the American Constitution, and yet the backlash against has so far been mediocre, save for a select few influential public figures and companies, and Vice Magazine, who rather sneakily unveiled that Lamar Smith, author of SOPA,  used an un-watermarked and un-credited photograph on his Congressional website just prior to the law being submitted.  DJ Schulte, author of the photograph, says in the article: "...according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against Smith".

There's little doubt that PIPA and SOPA transgress the First Amendment to the American Constitution, and yet the backlash against has so far been mediocre.

At what point do we have to give up all of our freedoms?

George Orwell would have a few things to say about this.