SOPA: Not Appetizing At All

SOPA, ahhh...at first glance, the word invokes great memories of family dinners with tasty Hispanic soups such as sancocho and cocido...the punchline being that sopa is Spanish for soup. (Ba-dum, ching) The SOPA (or Stop Online Piracy Act) that Congress was cooking up for internet websites and users however, didn't sound as warm and palatable, but cold and force-fed, much like the cod liver oil that mothers serve to their hesitant children ("come on now, it's good for you!").

Despite being someone who pirates often, my short attention span didn't allow me to comprehend the anti-SOPA movement, or the Act itself, entirely. All I knew prior to these readings is that it would've made pirating (and web-browsing, as evidenced by the Wikipedia withdrawal I suffered during the one-day "blackout") much more inconvenient. The two-step process described in the Bill Summary, in which IP holders provide a written notification identifying the site to related payment network providers and Internet advertising services, and the subsequent limited injunctive relief if said infringing sites didn't respond, sounded harsh, but fair. The additional bit of information provided by Prof. Herman's summary (albeit related to the earlier COICA bill), which states that the latter injunctive relief could occur without an adversarial hearing during which a site’s operator could defend their right to continue about their business sounds unfair and under-handed though

Similarly, the bill summary's mention of Attoney General-influenced preventive measures such as preventing users located in the United States from accessing the infringing site doesn't sound much unlike what YouTube does with certain copyrighted videos ("sorry, this video will not play in your country because it's copyrighted by [x] company"). Supplementing it with the Professor's "AllYourVideosHere.com" example, which states that sites holding even arguably infringing content could be frozen out, demonstrates how broad and obnoxious these domain seizure acts could've been. Would that mean that a site with videos such as, for example, me belting out a piss-poor rendition of Survivor's 'Burning Heart" (which I do often) would be at risk of getting shuttered? Guess so.

It was interesting to read how the SFU ("Strong Fair Use") coalition's heavy internet advocacy managed to break through to previously uninitiated people (of which I'm one) as well as having the double effect of educating them on the related DRM (Digital Rights Management) debate. I had thought that the anti-SOPA movement was exclusively the brainchild of internet juggernauts (as their sites are what make up the bulk of my usual internet traffic), with the aforementioned Wikipedia pulling off that "blackout" stunt and whatnot, but I guess I was wrong. Still, finding myself repeatedly being met with Wiki's "blackout" page on that January (?) day, and wondering if the same fate could befall YouTube was when the severity of SOPA really dawned on me. Glad that bullet was dodged.