SOPA and PIPA explained
I woke up to a tweet from one of my blog readers asking that I talk about SOPA and PIPA in laymen's terms. Seeing as I was still half asleep, I thought he was talking about Kate Middleton's sister. Ha! So I'm like okay, I know Pippa...but who the heck is Sopa? Terrible, right?
But he was not talking about the Royals or anything of the sort. What he wanted me to discuss were the new anti-piracy laws floating through Congress.
SOPA is basically a bill that will block foreign sites that infringe on copyrights. The way the government intends to enforce it is by actually holding US sites liable that feed content through their pages to US consumers.
Why? Well the US really has no control over what goes on with foreign owned and operated sites. The legislation that currently exists to stop piracy in the US, really only has the teeth to bite US companies. So the new law will require US companies to block/ban foreign sites that have pirated material.
Google spoke out against the proposed new SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) law by blacking out their name on the homepage. In law we call that redacting. Basically you redact information that is "privileged" or illegal to show to certain people. Opponents say that the law will virtually cripple the internet. After all some sites have both "pirated" and non pirated material. So in trying to protect the copyrighted material you in effect kill access to other material, thus shutting down free expression and exchange of ideas aka Free Speech.
Most consumers never really look at piracy as something bad or wrong. People have been bootlegging material since cassette tapes and BETAs (I think that was the thing before VHS...I don't know because I'm not THAT old hahaha). Since it is such a normal thing it is pretty much generally accepted.
However, how would you feel if you spent a long time working on something and someone took it? Not only took it, but made money from it? Since I've started writing, I've come to appreciate the need to protect certain materials.
One day I wrote an article for my column (that I get paid to write), I perused the internet, and saw my article chopped and screwed on someone's blog with ZERO attribution. Initially I wrote the person requesting they cite me for the article. However, later that evening the citation was still missing, then I noticed they were promoting the blog post on Twitter. I was heated!
My reaction was: it would be one thing to post the article with a link back...it is another to post MY WORK and then use it as though it were your own. In the words of Big Worm...messing with my money is like messing with my emotions! :) hahaha. Eventually the blogger placed a citation on the work, linking it back to my column.
So basically the law intends to help protect intellectual property (the original works of a person), so as not to short someone for the hard work they have put into their products. I understand that. The question: Does the law go too far? Will it hamper the free exchange of ideas?
Quiet as kept, the Senate has already passed a similar bill called PIPA.
For more on SOPA and PIPA check out this article on CNN Money: http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/17/technology/sopa_explained/index.htm
I hope I did an okay job with this @JordantheCEO :)
