Your SOPA primer. Because I care.
Despite admonishments from your favourite sites yesterday promising darkness all throughout the internet, it still seems to be here today. Even during the big ol’ SOPA strike. GoDaddy still seems to be thriving, even AFTER a largely pointless protest of their services where legions of subscribers dumped them for someone else.
For a bit of news though, the SOPA and PIPA co-sponsors ran from their bill with their tails between their legs today. No word on how the protest affected their thinking:
The widespread Internet blackout Wednesday, in which sites such as Wikipedia and Reddit went dark to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), seems to have influenced members of the U.S. Congress.
PIPA co-sponsor Florida Sen. Marco Rubio pulled his name from the bill Wednesday and SOPA co-sponsor Arizona Rep. Ben Quayle pulled his name Tuesday.
Rubio communicated his withdrawal via a Facebook post, titled “A Better Way to Fight the Online Theft of American Ideas and Jobs,” in which he argues congress should avoid rushing to pass the bill that could have unintended consequences.
“As a senator from Florida, a state with a large presence of artists, creators and businesses connected to the creation of intellectual property, I have a strong interest in stopping online piracy that costs Florida jobs.
However, we must do this while simultaneously promoting an open, dynamic Internet environment that is ripe for innovation and promotes new technologies.”
The Florida Senator encouraged his co-sponsor Nevada Sen. Harry Reid to follow his lead and abandon the bill in order to “take more time to address the concerns raised by all sides, and come up with new legislation that addresses Internet piracy while protecting free and open access to the Internet.”
Well done, then. I’ll be keeping an eye out on who else flees from these stinking bills like rats on a sinking ship.
Along those lines, for those of my readers who haven’t a clue what these two bills are (because you’re fortunate enough to live outside of the US where your legislators aren’t flying douchebags), as well as my 97 year old grandmother who’s tired of seeing SOPA splashed all over her spiffy iPad, here’s the best primer I can find on the subject from our friends at Gawker:
SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act
It’s a House anti-piracy bill currently making its way through Congress that targets foreign websites dedicated to piracy—i.e. The Pirate Bay, and those janky Chinese TV-streaming websites you watch Mad Men on. Obviously, media companies and News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch love the thing.
It is bad
But the internet—yes, THE ENTIRE INTERNET—is mad about SOPA because the bill overreaches in trying to destroy what they dramatically call “rogue” websites. Some of its provisions, like forcing search engines like Google to delist foreign sites deemed dedicated to piracy, sounds suspiciously like something China would do. CNET calls SOPA “an Internet death penalty,” but SOPA is so broad that a lot of legitimate websites could be mistakenly executed. Do you want innocent websites to die?
You Should Care
SOPA represents a step towards an internet where the U.S. government and giant corporations have the power to determine what you see (or don’t) when you Google something, or type in the URL of a website they don’t like. (More than they already do, of course.) If you value an internet that is weird and upsetting and fun, and not just a digital shopping mall, then you should care about fighting SOPA.
Beware SOPA Madness
But some people really go overboard with this thing. Techies have been freaking out like SOPA would force U.S. troops to crush one million kittens, instead of just possibly censor some websites. They’ve staged a pointless boycott of web domain provider GoDaddy for supporting it, threatened to “destroy” the senators behind it, and bravely posed in front of their webcams for this insufferably twee “I Work for the Internet” campaign.
It’s Probably Not Going to Pass
At least not as it’s written now. SOPA was shelved on Monday after the White House came out against it, as it’s currently written. Internet people point out that a sister bill, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), is still being considered in the Senate. But PIPA’s sponsor, Sen. Patrick Leahy, has said he’d be willing to remove the most objectionable parts. At this point, today’s big blackout is as much a power play by geeks as anything. They’re making noise in order to show political solidarity in advance of 2012 and beyond—for better or worse.
There you go, Grams. Now stop asking me about it already.
And what did I do in order to protest these bills? Nothing much; I just called a few legislators who I knew that actually supported the damn thing and expressed my concerns as a citizen. I’m hoping all those that were busy patting themselves on the back because they were darkening their sites for today did the same, instead of going out shopping. Because, in the grand scheme of things these sites going dark is a nice sentiment. But, much to their surprise, the internet is still functioning quite nicely while they take a day off. A powerful message has to be delivered properly. Even Norma Rae new that.
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