‘Thou shalt not steal’ vs. the First Amendment

I wanted to support it. I really did. The premise for Congress’s Stop Online Piracy Act, the protection of copyrighted material, sounded very positive. I don’t think that many people would say that they really think using others’ work without permission is OK.

But the more I read about it, the more concerned I grew. Because the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act - designed to lay out enforcement measures on copyright infringement - had no influence over foreign sites like The Pirate Bay, the government (specifically U.S. Representative Lamar Smith of Texas) is seeking, through this bill (and its sister bill, the Project IP Act), to restrict access to sites that “host or facilitate the trading of pirated content.”

While that all sounds very well and good, what would actually happen would be that websites would be penalized if users posted copyrighted material on them - and CNN.com said that this would put the “burden of proof - and the legal cost of fighting a false allegation - on the accused.” Adam Dachis with “Explainer” said, “This is still problematic because a tool designed to accept user-generated content is, to some extent, at the whims of its users. This puts a lot of power in the hands of rights-holders and has significant potential for abuse.”

Current policies alert host sites like YouTube when users post copyrighted videos; per the DMCA, the “takedown notice” requires the site to both inform the user who uploaded the content and remove the material “within a reasonable amount of time.” Under SOPA, these websites would have to completely redesign their monitoring of content - and Google Public Policy Director Bob Boorstin went so far as to say that, if SOPA were enacted, that YouTube would “just go dark immediately. It couldn’t function.”

Many influential websites - including Twitter, Google, Reddit, Kickstarter, Tumblr, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, eBay, Zynga, Facebook and Wikipedia - are actively speaking out against SOPA, urging Congress to find another way to get copyright infringement under control. On Jan. 18, Google “censored” its logo with a large black box over the search bar. Wikipedia shut down its site in protest.

Many of these companies came together to write a letter to Congress, which read, in part, “We support the bills’ stated goals. Unfortunately, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities [and] mandates that would required monitoring of websites.”

The Bill of Rights’ First Amendment protects our freedom of speech, which naysayers to SOPA claim includes the topic of censorship. I have to agree with them that this bill would strongly veer toward censorship and inhibit our freedom in how we use the Internet. Companies in opposition said that SOPA would give the justice department “the power to shut down any site which is accused of infringing on IP rights.”

The Obama administration does not back SOPA, and so, for now, the bill is going nowhere and will have to be revisited. You can write to Congress via www.americancensorship.org and voice your opposition to your rights’ being violated. After all, nobody owns the Internet (right, Al Gore?).