A Brief Summary of What’s Up With SOPA, Part I and What’s Up With SOPA, Part II

Last week I wrote “What’s Up With SOPA, Part I” that looked into internet copyright and outlined some of the opposition arguments in detail. I am hopefully getting a shortened version of that article published in our school newspaper, the Denisonian — no doubt they’ll shorten it even further. While I do intend to, very soon, write Part II on SOPA, I wanted to publish the shortened version that I submitted for those who just want the general persuasive gist without all the lengthy analysis:

On January 18, many websites – ranging from Wikipedia and Google to Reddit and Dinosaur Comics – decided to shut down in some way to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act, commonly referred to as “SOPA”. Given this shut down, we have to wonder – what’s up? Why is the internet coming out in droves to oppose this legislation, as opposed to some other legislation, or no legislation at all? What’s so terrible about this bill?

Here are a few of the big problems with SOPA that have led the internet to staunch opposition:

Big Problem #1: SOPA Places an Unfair Burden on Websites

Under the current law, the Digitial Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), when a person uploads something to a website that violates copyright, the owner of the copyright can have the court order this site to take down this material. Provided the website in question complies with this request and is not knowingly perpetrating copyright violations, the website is what DMCA calls a “safe harbor” and will not get further penalty – even if it is served with repeated violations.

SOPA will change this by greatly reducing the “safe harbor” provision seen in the DMCA, greatly increasing the responsibility of sites to combat copyright infringement themselves through the scanning and regulating of their own material, rather than wait for take-down requests. SOPA would allow an entire site to be blocked because its users engage in copyright theft on their own accord.

This is why websites such as Reddit could be shut down. Reddit contains many original, legal posts; yet still are bogged down with a tiny minority trying to violate copyright. As such, they will find themselves under SOPA having to patrol the millions of posts with filters to find and remove all copyrighted material and then put in place methods to block that material from ever being posted again.

This sounds reasonable until you realize how difficult it is to successfully track and stop all copyright violations. First, people are very adept already at circumventing filters and blockers, accomplishing this would be a large technical challenge for sites. This difficulty is further compounded by the fact that there is no central database of all copyrighted works – someone could post from obscure works and still violate copyright without anyone knowing. It’s all the difficulty of professors trying to stop plagiarism, plus way more.

Big Problem #2: SOPA Will Not Actually Stop Intellectual Theft

This burden to websites seems strict, but maybe it’s necessary to stop internet piracy? Turns out that SOPA doesn’t even accomplish what it sets out to do! SOPA is going to be like the Digital Rights Management (DRM) of the internet – the annoying thing that is supposed to prevent people from duplicating DVDs, but in reality just annoys those who buy the DVDs legally by making them unable to skip the previews.

This has to do with how SOPA plans on handling pirated content that comes from outside the US, such as ThePirateBay. Since many sites outside of the US are outside the jurisdiction of the US to directly shut down, the government will instead have their websites delisted from the Domain Name Registrar. The way this works is that, in reality, sites exist as a series of numbers like 163.129.308.417 which are connected to domain names like www.example.com.

The government could then sever this connection, so that going to www.example.com won’t direct you to 163.129.308.417 and thus not get you the content. But pirates who are in the know could just access 163.129.308.417 directly and circumvent this block. Thus, as this argument goes, all the government has done is put the tiniest of hurdles in front of the pirate, while severely inconveniencing all of the legal users.

Big Problem #3: SOPA Contains Vague Language that History Shows Us Will Be Abused

Another complaint about SOPA is that it will be taken advantage of through stretching this vague language to shut down what is, in reality, innocent. For instance, I could personally try to shut down a site I don’t like by posting copyrighted works from multiple anonymous accounts and then reporting that site to the Department of Justice.

Initially, claims of abuse seem exaggerated. But copyright holders do have a stunning history of overreaching in exactly this fashion. Recently, Viacom was accused by Google of uploading its own copyrighted content to YouTube and then suing Google, the owner of YouTube, for damages — with Viacom employees even going as far as uploading content from Kinkos and doctoring it to look stolen. Another company, Universal, was caught taking down material on YouTube under a copyright claim for a copyright they didn’t even own! Lastly, there have been cases of companies going after YouTube videos of children solely because they were singing along to copyrighted songs.

Conclusion

SOPA seems well intentioned, and we as a nation definitely need to do something more serious about intellectual property theft. However, SOPA is simply not the answer – it is the equivalent of stopping the Mafia by bombing New York City.

Just look at MegaUpload. This was the exact kind of website the government wants to shut down – the kind of site that directly profits off of copyright infringement. This site could be shut down purely through the use of the DMCA, without requiring SOPA at all. If the government already can do what it wants to do, why do we need the marginal benefits of SOPA at the large costs to Internet users and providers?

SOPA puts major financial costs on websites to somehow come up with filters that will remove and prevent all copyright infringement on their site, and contain vague language that will make websites even easier to abuse. This is an impossible task for websites to handle, and comes at very little benefit. No wonder everyone is up in arms against SOPA.

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