Websites go on strike over proposed SOPA and Protect IP Acts
Many websites, including some very influential brands, went on strike this week in protest against the proposed SOPA and Protect IP (PIPA) acts. These acts plan to give new and unrivaled powers to the American government to take down and block any website they feel violates intellectual property or copyright laws more than 10 times in 6 months and jail the site’s owners for up to 5 years. A further contraversial aspect is the idea that this would give the US government and rights holders would have the right to seek court orders against any site accused of “enabling or facilitating” piracy, i.e those sharing links to or seeming to promote sites which they deem infringes the acts. Search engines will also be legally forced to remove listings of any of the sites deemed in infringement of the act. Is this the start of the ‘Great FireWall of America’?
Site’s such as Wikipedia, Boinboing, WordPress, Flickr, Mozilla, Reddit, Wired and many more started controversial strike action yesterday blacking out their sites and replacing them with a strong anti SOPA and PIPA message. Sites such as http://sopastrike.com/ sprung up to share ways to black out websites with site owners as well as a list of other sites on strike.
The acts allow anyone found owning a site which streams copyrighted material without permission or sharing links to such content to be removed from the web in the US. This would see America creating it’s own ‘Great FireWall of China’ as it intends to use the same ISP immunity technique which would effectively make them “disappear” from the internet. They will be able to do this based on ‘credible evidence’ which makes it tempting for sites to falsely report rival companies. Something they say they will screen for but will in practice be very hard to implement.
Here at Blink we are in favour of protecting copyrighted material from abuse, however, as stated by Steven Fry; “Art flourishes in ages of soft copyright & dies with none or over-strict copyright”. No real understanding has been made in this bill that many areas are grey when it comes to copyright infringement.
Quite often sharing something not for profit is a neutral or good thing rather than a clear cut crime. Ever uploaded a music video to Youtube to help promote your favourite band? A movie trailer of an upcoming movie? Or shared a link to such material? These videos are not being sold by the copyright owners and you are not selling them. In fact this is free marketing for the band/film in question something they should be happy to know they were reaching a wider audience. AMV’s are another grey area, these are home made music videos using animated materials from TV shows by individuals to create their own piece of video to their favourite song. Often they list the animations used and the band responsible for the music – technically copyright infringement but also an artistic expression and free viral marketing for the music and shows. Another very grey area are fan-subs; Small groups of people band together, faithfully translate TV shows with no subtitles and release in their native country and share the files at no profit, many also remove their files if an official version is released. These acts seem to allow a certain degree of interpretation which could potentially make the ‘perpetrators’ of the above and those who shares links to their sites criminalised and have their sites blocked without trial.
The internet is rife with people illegally sharing movies and music against the will of the copyright owners, it is also full of people sharing grey area media, linking to sites which may contain either or the above and young people linking to all these sites. Some are definitely malicious, some are definitely not, many are in between. Either way, everyone deserves a fair trial and chance to have their say and correct their actions before being punished.
These are just some areas to think about and we hope these bills go through some serious revisions before they are passed. We feel they are too all-encompassing and heavy handed. We hope a compromise can be met which not only helps protect copyright holders from infringement but also upholds free speech and implements a fair system of investigation and punishment for any guilty parties.
Supporters of the bills include television networks, music publishers, movie industry bodies, book publishers and manufacturers.
Critics include Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo, eBay, LinkedIn, AOL and Zynga.
You can read up more on SOPA and PIPA at the following links:
BBC explaination on SOPA and PIPA
BBC article on the blackout protests
