It has become clearer over the last decade that content businesses have had a growing problem keeping control of the copyrights they hold on their content. To combat this issue, governments and businesses alike have tried many methods to control how much of their content appears freely on the Internet, to varying levels of success. The latest attempt that the American government is making is through a bill in the House of Representatives called SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act. Although it’s targeted towards “combating the theft of U.S. property”, opponents of the act have claimed it could lead to an American version of the Great Firewall of China, the huge Internet censor that the Chinese government employs on its citizens.
The meat behind the debate over SOPA is that it allows the entertainment industry to censor sites that “engage in, enable or facilitate” any form of copyright infringement. So if The Iron Warrior, for example, was accused of having an article encouraging piracy, the U.S. government would have Internet service providers (ISPs) block the iwarrior.uwaterloo.ca domain. This in itself would be a rather effective way of discouraging piracy in the U.S., but the bill is unable to block IP addresses. This means that if you know the numeric IP address for a website, such as The Iron Warrior’s website, you would still be able visit it by entering the IP address into the address bar. Essentially, this doesn’t block committed pirates at all, because they will still be able to access the website in some form, but it makes it a lot easier to censor websites that even suggest the promotion of piracy by blocking mainstream access to the site’s domain.
Perhaps SOPA’s greatest strength is its financial power. If a copyright holder feels that a website is infringing on its rights in some way, it can request that payment and ad services close off financial support. These services have five days to comply after receiving a notice from the copyright holder, and most likely services will simply shut down whole accounts instead of being given a specific subset of payments to freeze. Websites have five days to file a counter-notice, which is already a very short amount of time, but financial services do not have to comply with the counter-notice. This is because there are provisions that allow them to unquestionably choke a site if they feel there is “reasonable belief” that the site, in some way, enables copyright infringement.
The most vulnerable sites are not sites that directly host pirated content but social networking sites. If someone uploads a copyrighted photo to Facebook or video with copyrighted content to YouTube, those sites could potentially be targets for SOPA. While these ones are large enough to be able to fight off legal threats, the next Facebook or YouTube will probably be too small to defend itself from financial account freezes from SOPA notices. The long-term effect of this is that SOPA will effectively kill off any socially-based startups as they will all potentially be targets for some form of copyright infringement.
From a security perspective, internet security specialists worry SOPA will destabilize the Domain Name System (DNS), which acts as a sort of Internet phonebook and backbone. For ISPs to blacklist websites, they will have to alter the records in the DNS so that when their users attempt to visit the website, the DNS will send back essentially incorrect data. Many claim modifying the DNS with false information would ruin the system’s ability to provide a universal naming system, which is a primary value of the Internet as it is today. It would also throw a wrench into efforts to release DNS-SEC, which acts as a veil over the DNS that prevents hackers from modifying DNS entries to send users to incorrect sites.
SOPA isn’t an entirely new concept or bill, but builds upon past bills and acts that have their roots as far back as the PRO-IP Act sent through the House of Representatives on May 8, 2008, the Senate on September 26, 2008 and signed into law by George W. Bush on October 13, 2008. The PRO-IP Act was introduced with the purpose of increasing the penalties for copyright and intellectual property violators due to increased sophistication in piracy and counterfeit products. The PRO-IP Act was followed by the proposal of the PROTECT IP Act on May 12, 2011, a Senate-side companion bill to SOPA that caused a stir this summer when it tried doing many of the same things that SOPA is proposing. It was put on hold but a Senate vote on the bill will likely follow sometime in December. Senator Ron Wyden, who put the hold on the bill, is the primary Senator against its implementation and has proposed an Internet-rooted filibuster to delay voting on the bill. It seems quite likely that the Senate will pass the legislation otherwise, given that 40 of the 100 senators are cosponsors of the bill, let alone the other senators who will likely vote for it.
The might of the tech community is also primarily openly against the passing of SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act, with Twitter, Google, Tumblr, Mozilla, Facebook, and many other organizations outright opposing the bill. The Business Software Association (BSA), which includes large companies such as Intel, Adobe, Microsoft and Apple, originally supported the passing of the bill, but at the end of November changed their stance due to the wording of the bill and its ramifications on free speech and privacy. While there’s not much we can do in Canada if we’re against it, encourage your friends in the U.S. can write letters and emails to their Senators and Representatives and sign Senator Wyden’s petition at http://stopcensorship.org/ to be included in his proposed filibuster. If the bill does pass, it would set a precedent for governments around the world to introduce their own “intellectual property protection” laws, forever fragmenting the Internet to a greater degree than it is now.
For a medium that encourages freedom, thought, community and openness, it is uncomfortable to see the powers that be attempt to change it to a departmentalized, splintered, unstable network. Canadians and citizens of other nations should be watchful of their governments and stay informed of government agendas to prevent bills like these from simply passing without any meaningful debate. If we let these bills become law without questioning them or rewording them to avoid ambiguity, it’s only a matter of time before we realize that the privileges we once enjoyed are no longer available.
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