Congress Has the People on Their Soap Boxes Over the SOPA Debate

     Despite the enormity of copyright law debates that have occurred over the last few decades, I am going to focus on only one; the most important of our time. SOPA, or Stop Online Piracy Act, is a currently debated law proposed by Lamar S. Smith. The law would include removal of websites that aided the occurrence of copyright infringement; specifically targeting torrent, file sharing and file storing websites.  To uncover the specifics of this law you can read all about it here. PIPA, or the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act is also linked to SOPA. It was proposed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy on May 12th 2011 in order to provide methods for the United States government to prevent people from being able to access denied websites. SOPA was proposed in order to allow the government to be able to permanently remove offensive or copyright infringing websites. Through the enactment of this law the Attorney General would be able to utilize the federal court system in order to remove unwanted websites' domain names and post the removed websites publicly. Let me just pause right here and say a little bit about our attorney general Eric Holder. He is the same man who recently proposed that voters should no longer require any form of photo ID because the necessity discriminated against minority voters. Yes, lets have this man in charge of what we can and cannot do in our lives. 
     The point of having file sharing abilities in this day and age is not simply for piracy or illegal file sharing. It  may be used for that as well, but it was intended for expansion of ideas, sharing of legitimate content, and ultimate growth of the internet. Original engineers of the internet as well as Tim Berners-Lee have both declared their opposition to the bill and are working toward convincing congress to ignore the proposals. 
     The idea of internet censorship based upon similar principles as those used in China, Seria, Uzbekistan etc. made me want to take action. I don't normally care enough about current legislative debates enough to contribute anything to society in the form of activism, but this was a potential restriction that I was NOT comfortable with. My Facebook page was covered with a few of these links to sign petitions through Demand Progress, the leading advocacy group opposing SOPA.

Demand Progress: Advocacy Group in Opposition to the Bill

    The shutdown of Megaupload on January 19th 2012 demonstrates the pointlessness of SOPA.The FBI and U.S. Dept. of Justice certainly did a good enough job eliminating the largest pirated video file sharing organization on the internet and certainly it can do so again. If other companies/ websites arise such as Napster, or Grokster, as James Boyle explains in Chapter 4 of his novel The Public Domain, they will be shut down now just as the supreme court did then.
     "To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes." —H.R. 3261 is what the SOPA description claims it will do and yet, the very problems that it will solve will simply create more. These could include restriction of legitimate websites from their upstart, inability for the common user to have a place to store files, and/or a "black market" of internet websites that people WILL figure out how to access. 
     In his article "Lockdown the Coming War on General Purpose Computing," Corey Doctorow explains the ridiculousness of the SOPA and PIPA proposals: The copyright wars are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry is just the first belligerents to take up arms, and we tend to think of them as particularly successful. After all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, ready to break the Internet on a fundamental level— all in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies. Exactly.
     Isn't there a way to monitor corrupt and illegal use of the internet without dashing the basic principles of why and how it was created? Apparently not, however, the longer the bill is pushed back to be voted on, the more time advocates of internet freedom have to lobby and generate new, better solutions. Also, the more time we have to download all the free stuff we can... before we can't!