7/29/2019 The Stop Online Piracy Act: Stopping Piracy By Doing Nothing

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The Stop Online Piracy Act: Stopping Piracy By Doing Nothing | Somos

Tejanos

Thursday, April 12 2012, 5:48 PM

The Stop Online Piracy Act: Stopping Piracy By Doing Nothing

Submitted by Eduardo Robles on Fri, 01/13/2012 - 1:06pm

More than two million people have spoken out against this bill via email and phone calls to Congress. Social media sites like Reddit, Tumblr and Twitter,

companies like Google, Yahoo! and eBay and some of the biggest websites on the Internet have joined with the nations largest Internet rights advocates in

opposition to this legislation.

Before the holiday season began, commotion began brewing within the technology community about a couple of bills that were making their way through

Congress that would stifle expression across the internet. These bills known as Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (also known as

PIPA) would undermine the future of the Internet by creating devastating new tools for silencing legitimate speech all around the web.

News about the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA (H.R 3261 ) a bill that could destroy free speech on the Internet is everywhere on the Internet. But

it's nowhere on the nightly news. Here at Somos Tejanos, we choose to inform the public on threats to free speech, so, lets dive in and analyze some of the

facts about SOPA.

What is SOPA?

SOPA is the acronym for Stop Online Piracy Act. In the House of Representatives it is known as H.R 3261 . The Senate has a companion bill, the

PROTECT IP Act (also known as PIPA) more on this bill later. The main purpose of the bill is supposedly to curb infringing on websites by allowing the

Department of Justice to block them.

Who introduced SOPA and who supports it?

SOPA was introduced into the House of Representatives by Lamar Smith (TX-21), with help of corporate shills who now have swell lobbyist jobs to show

for it and is a bill aimed at combating online piracy in the worst conceivable way possible. By giving copyright holders and the government overreaching,

due process-circumventing powers to shut down entire websites based on the mere suspicion that they might contain infringing material.

As it turns out, the owners of ABC (Disney), CBS (CBS Corp.), Fox News (News Corp.), MSNBC (Comcast) and NBC (Comcast) are all supporters of the

bill.

When was SOPA introduced?

H.R 3261 was brought to committee on October 26 of last year. It went back and forth in the House Judiciary Committee until the debate was halted for

winter recess. Now that Congress is coming back from their winter recess the debate has sprung up again and a vote is going to happen by the end of this

month.

How does SOPA work?

SOPA can give U.S companies the ability to go directly to the U.S Attorney General's office with a court order to block any websites' domain name (DNS).

The domain name, is the technical term for a website address for example Google.com or Facebook.com. The only condition is that the website has to

either be hosting or promoting the illegal download of copyrighted material owned by U.S companies.

Copyright infringement is a serious offense and no laughing matter. But SOPA takes the wrong approach to stopping copyright infringement because of a

loophole in the SOPA bill the inability to block a websites IP address. The Internet is a global network of many individual computer networks, all speaking

the same computer language, the Internet Protocol (IP).

Every computer connected to the Internet has an IP address, a unique numeric identifier that can be "static", i.e. unchanging, or may be "dynamically"

assigned by your ISP, such that your computers address changes with each new Internet session.

In other words, for the unacquainted, DNS are like the roadmaps of the web, taking the URLs typed in or attained from a hyperlink and directing the browse

to the appropriate address (IP). Therefore, screwing around with DNS doesnt just affect a single site. anyone is still allowed to access any website site

however, they would have to manually enter the websites unique numeric identifier. Good luck with that. How many are going to remember or write down

an IP address, such Google.com or SomosTejanos.org, because the domain name is blocked.

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Finally SOPA can stop the indexing of a website on search engines. According to the bill:

(B) INTERNET SEARCH ENGINES- A provider of an Internet search engine shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as

expeditiously as possible, but in any case within 5 days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order,

designed to prevent the foreign infringing site that is subject to the order, or a portion of such site specified in the order, from being served as a

direct hypertext link.

To put it mildly, next time you decide to use Google or Yahoo and suddenly notice your favorite web site that condenses long news article paragraphs from

sites such the New York Times or the Texas Tribune, they will no longer appear. Essentially, they would have to stop linking to lesser known blogs, forum

operators, nonprofits , and news outlets that tend to get sued by copyright zealots, such as Righthaven , over unauthorized online posts of newspaper articles

With shrinking newsrooms, the amount of local coverage and investigative pieces on vital local topics, such as this issue , tend to be ignored or get cursory

coverage without focusing on some of the issues that are changing the world. As long as critical issues go unreported, quality journalism continues to beabandoned, and local content will continue to be eliminated from public view.

This is why Somos Tejanos exists, to serve the public interest. By providing insight about what hasn't been written about, directing attention where it hasn't

been, and saying something new.

To give you an idea of the potential damage this law, if passed, could have, especially to websites like Somos Tejanos. Here is preliminary data analysis from

the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse , a website that collects and analyzes legal complaints about online activity, database of the increasing number cease-and-

desist notices.

Why is SOPA so controversial?

Well if you haven't realized it yet, SOPA is basically giving private businesses the power to regulate the Internet. The goal of SOPA may be to stop online

piracy but the end result is regulation of the Internet. This is why SOPA is so controversial because the liberty we have over the Internet is at stake.

The bill claims to promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation, but in reality the Internet already does this. The problem is not with

the Internet but with some of the companies trying to get this bill passed. The motion picture industry is one of the supporters of SOPA and of course they are

going to promote and defend a bill that hopes to end piracy. The reason why they have it wrong is because they are not looking to innovate to accommodate

Internet technologies but instead they wish to regulate them. The same thing happened when the radio was introduced or when the VCR, began to take off

Companies and industries such as the Motion Picture Association of America failed to innovate to these technologies, so instead chose to fight them.

So what can I do stop SOPA and protect the Internet?

The fight continues on today but it is our current technologies the PC and the Internet that are at stake. More and more people are using the Internet on a daily

basis and this technology is vital for future innovation. This is why many across the Internet are working together to oppose SOPA. One of the ways to

oppose SOPA is to simply read the bill itself.

Secondly, you can call your Representative, especially Rep Lamar Smith of District 21, not to support SOPA, and especially your own member of Congress

should the law make its way to the floor of the U.S. House.

SOPA in the end is a great example of how backward some U.S businesses are and their failure to innovate. It also shows how technologically behind someof our Congress members are. We are living in a technologically advanced society yet we are still struggling to understand how to use technology. For some

they simply shut themselves away from technology others flourish, but they leave others behind. There needs to be a balance especially because

technological advancements are coming and always evolving. We cannot leave people behind and we cannot move along if people are refusing to move

forward.

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https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtmlhttps://www.chillingeffects.org/statshttp://www.chillingeffects.org/http://mediamatters.org/blog/201201050008http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/righthaven-saving-the-newspaper-industry-one-lawsuit-at-a-time.arshttp://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/copyright-troll-righthavens-epic-blunder-a-lawsuit-targeting-ars.arshttp://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/copyright-troll-righthavens-epic-blunder-a-lawsuit-targeting-ars.arshttp://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/copyright-troll-righthaven-achieves-spectacular-fair-use-loss.ars