When republican Senator Lamar Smith from Texas introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), he probably was not aware of the massive protest soon to come from SOPA.
Jan. 18 was the largest online protest in history to stop the Internet censorship bills, an estimated 7,000 sites in total, protested.
Many high-profile companies such as Google, Facebook, eBay, Twitter and Yahoo protested the proposed legislation by “censoring” their own sites for a day. Google for instance put a big black censorship box over the prominent logo on the site.
Other well-known sites like Wikipedia, Craigslist, Reddit and TwitPic went completely black on this day for a period of time, many from 8 in the morning until 8 at night. Going black means to completely shut down the site and anyone who visited the site would see a page saying something about SOPA and it’s sister act in the Senate, Protect IP Act (PIPA).
Tumblr (a well known blogging site) started placing censorship blocks over users’ text in an attempt to get people to call their senators. According to Tumblr’s official twitter account, 90 thousand users called in complaints and protests, averaging 3.6 calls per second to the Senate.
Google claims to have collected over four and a half million signatures in a petition against SOPA. Members of Anonymous, a hacktivist group (the group who shut down the PSN over the summer) claim responsibility for slowing/shutting down pro-SOPA organizations’ Web sites such as the Justice Department, FBI, Universal Music Group, Recording Industry Association of America, Motion Picture Association of America and CBS.com in a denial of service attack. Anonymous also threatened to shut down all of Facebook’s 60,000 servers on Jan. 28 had the legislators not postponed their attempt to pass SOPA.
SOPA and PIPA are attempts by the government to stop online piracy, however, these acts give way to much power to the government by allowing them to take legal affirmative against sites that they feel are allowing or enabling copyright infringement.
They will be able to sue any site that has not removed the blacklisted sites from their own. This would include and shut down search engines, blog sites, or directories.
It would allow private corporations to create their own blacklists of Web sites that they feel are infringing their copyrights, which seems would contain a whole lot of bias.
It’s almost as if a legal mafia would be formed, which would control the majority of sites everyday users visit.
If enacted, “an entire Web site containing tens of thousands of pages could be targeted if only a single page were accused of infringement,” says Laurence Tribe, a big time law professor and author at Harvard, says that both of these are unconstitutional bills.
Many say the proposed legislation is threatening free speech and innovation.
Wikipedia alleged that SOPA is “an Internet blacklist bill (that) would allow corporations, organizations, or the government to order an Internet service provider to block an entire Web site simply due to an allegation that the site posted infringing content.”
“Speeding is illegal too, but you don’t put speed bumps on the highway,” says Vice-President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes. She also believes that instead of enacting “bad legislation,” we should be taking measures to protect the open net.