SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), for anyone who have been under a rock long enough to still not know what it represents, is a bill brought up in the US that takes trying to stop copyright infringement in the wrong direction. I’m sure everyone will agree that copyright infringement is bad (and at the same time, I’d be surprised if they had not committed infringement online in some fashion), but SOPA is not the answer for multiple reasons. For starters, it is too broad. In essence, if SOPA is passed, any website that had any connection to copywritten material at all would be forced to sever such a tie, or fear the consequences: loss of ad revenue from US internet advertising agencies and blacklisting from major US based search engines, Google in particular. A site can literally be taken down if a user say, posts a link to a picture that infringes on some copyright. SOPA also smears the idea of a “domestic” website and a “foreign” website. For instance, SOPA states that any website with .com, .org and other widely used domains is a “domestic” site, while any site with a different domain is flagged as a “foreign” site. This raises issues, as sites physically hosted on US soil can use nearly any domain it wants (Example, Redd.it), but are still flagged as “foreign”. The reverse is also possible (wikileaks.org apparently is a domestic site)! SOPA acts over all sites, but if a site is flagged as “domestic”, the site can be seized as a lawful act and obviously there are huge issues here. As a second point, SOPA won’t even be able to stop people from pirating software, no matter how hard it tries. Most large sites (Google, Facebook, etc.) would end up simply moving offshore and changing domain names to avoid such nightmares of doing what SOPA wants to stay online. As a protest against this bill, many large websites either blacked out or held some sort of censorship ad last Wednesday. Some very large and influential sites blacked out, including Wikipedia and Reddit (WORST. DAY. EVER.) This got the attention of many internet users that were previously ignorant of SOPA. Fortunately, SOPA has been shelved “until there is wider agreement on a solution”, which was announced after the blackout. There aren’t many good ideas for infringement protection for online copyright material, and SOPA is definitely at the top of the list. Even though this was a mad grab for the US to have more rule over the usage of the internet, they still seem to be able to do whatever they want with it, after the whole recent Megaupload debaucle. Nothing to do here.
On another note, what did everyone do while Reddit was down? Work? Hah! Many people were saying blackout day was going to be one of their most productive day in years. I thought that too. As a student on Co-op this term, I could not tell you the amount of times I thought “Ok, there is a lull at work, and everyone is sort of just chilling, I wonder what is going on online…” at which point I would instinctively open a Reddit window to find that damned countdown timer. “Hmm, this Mississauga bus is boring as all heck. REDDIT TIME!” … nope. I didn’t even have anything new to post on my Facebook wall! I even had co-workers walk past my desk with less than happy looks on their faces because Reddit and Wikipedia was down. From reading the sleuth of aftermath posts, the consensus was that most simply watched the countdown timer on the blackout page they discreetly stuck in centre view tick down, rather than actually being productive at work/school/home. Of course, procrastination on Reddit and random-ing articles on Wikipedia should not be what you are doing over schoolwork/job work, right guys? …Right? Where is my bacon…?
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