What is the big deal about SOPA and PIPA?
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 10:45AM SOPA and PIPA are legislation in the House and Senate that are making an attempt at stoppping the illegal selling and distribution of stolen copyrighted material. The problem is not what the bills are attempting to stop, but how they are planning to stop it.
The bill would give the courts the right to shut down any website that may be involved in providing or selling pirated material. The problem is that there are many web marketplaces, such as eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon, to name a few, that could be completely shut down if any user sold something that broke copyright rules. This would be like shutting down an entire shopping mall because one store sold something that was counterfeited.
The bill also gives the courts the right to block you from going to any website that links to a site that sells pirated material. So all search engines, such as Google, would be required to delete all links to that website or face the possibility of being shut down. This is akin to shutting down a gas station because the clerk gave directions to a nearby bank that was subsequently robbed.
Social media websites that provide the ability to share content with friends and the world would be in immediate danger due to this law. Sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Flickr allow their users to share content. Due to the high probability that some of this content could be copyrighted, these websites would have to either shut down or drastically change their business model. They already actively police the content uploaded by their users in an attempt to block pirated content, but there is no way to keep it 100% legitimate.
The bill also forces payment gateways to stop payments to any website that may be involved in selling pirated material. This is much like the first example, where the entire shopping mall had to stop taking credit card payments because of one store that sold something illegal.
When I say that the courts could block this, I should clarify that they would be able to do this without a trial. So if I had deep pockets and could afford the lawyers, I could accuse my competitors of selling illegal software and force the court to shut down their website and email, effectively shutting down a good portion of their business without anything being proven in court.
I hope that I have cleared this up for some of our customers and I hope that everyone that has time will both sign the petition at Google and contact your congressman and senators to stop this from going any further.