 "Photo: Robbie Eich")
After a media maelstrom caused the Internet community to go into panic mode, SOPA and PIPA have stalled in congress. The Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act, designed to protect artists and distributors from losing money due to massive circulation of bootleg content, failed to strike a chord among the online community.
The acts were too broad and gave the government too much power to control content on the Internet, which is why the (temporary) death of SOPA and PIPA is a good thing.
SOPA would have barred search engines from linking to sites that host copyrighted material and could have imposed up to a five-year jail sentence for illegally streaming copyrighted material.
PIPA would have given the government the ability to block access to websites within and outside the United States that linked to illegal content. SOPA and PIPA, despite what they were trying to accomplish, would have infringed on free speech rights – effectively censoring the Internet.
Now, when you say you oppose SOPA and PIPA it's easy to come across like you don't care about industries losing money over illegal downloading. That's not the case. No one's trying to demean the artists and distributors by saying we don't care about their money.
Piracy is obviously a huge problem, especially in music. A look at the huge decline in record sales over the past decade should make that clear.
Piracy is especially prominent among members of our generation. We're connoisseurs of pirated content and we illegally download without a second thought. We, as a generation, are used to stealing.
After years of declining sales, it makes sense that eventually someone would step in to try to protect copyrighted work, and there's nothing wrong with that. So why did SOPA and PIPA have so many detractors?
Ultimately the acts would have had more supporters had they been narrower. Instead, they gave the government huge, sweeping power to shut down any sites it deemed as violating copyright laws and, in essence, "stealing" content.
But that's how the trouble started. A lot of harmless websites and blogs would have gone down under SOPA and PIPA. Sure, the obvious sites such as MediaFire and BitTorrent would've been taken down. MegaUpload already went down, but what about blogs? The whole point of blogs is to report and add commentary on information taken from outside sources.
That's where the line begins to blur. Those sites could possibly fall under the SOPA/PIPA umbrella as well, and then what are we left with? The government picking and choosing which sites are ok while leaving the rest walking on eggshells. SOPA and PIPA would've brought the internet to a screeching halt which is exactly why so many people, young people in particular, opposed them. We're college students; you don't mess with our internet.
Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) decided to halt voting on PIPA and SOPA in order to draw up different versions of the acts. After causing such an uproar there was no way they could've voted in favor of the acts without creating even more hysteria. But, we're not out of the woods yet.
What we have on our hands is a small victory. Hopefully the new versions of the acts will be a bit narrower and focus a little less on trying to censor the Internet.
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