BUSINESS: SOPA and PIPA

By now most of you will probably have read about two bills which were presented in the US House of Representatives last October; Stop Online Piracy Act (aka SOPA) and Protect IP Act (aka PIPA). Yesterday many companies such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Reddit and many more demonstrated their opposition to these proposed bills by participating in a black out of some content on their sites. Etsy also showed their opposition and shared their views here: http://www.etsy.com/protect-innovation

In a nutshell these bills if made law (they decide on that later this month) will give the US Department of Justice and copyright holders the right to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Doesn't sound like such a bad thing does it? But what does that actually mean for all of us who use the internet.

If made law, websites which host user content like UK Handmade, Etsy, Flickr...the list goes on... would be liable for user's actions. That means that online communities such as UK Handmade would need to heavily police all content uploaded by users; an expensive and time-consuming task for a volunteer-run organisation which would most likely force its closure. 

Indeed, the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) has predicted that websites such as Etsy, Flickr and Vimeo are all likely to shut down if the bill becomes law, presumably because of this impossible task of self-policing such vast amounts of user content.

The not-for-profit public policy institute the New America Foundation said by way of example that "This legislation would enable law enforcement to take down the entire tumblr.com domain due to something posted on a single blog. Yes, an entire, largely innocent online community could be punished for the actions of a tiny minority".

At present The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides websites that host content with a "safe harbour" so that copyright owners who feel that the site is hosting content which infringes their copyright must request the site to remove the infringing material within a certain amount of time. If SOPA becomes law this "safe harbor" would be bypassed allowing judges to block access. 

Wikipedia gives some advice on how non-US folk can raise their concerns about this legislation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more

The arguments against these bills being passed into law are far more extensive than I can cover here today but you can read a pretty comprehensive summary of SOPA and PIPA over on Wikipedia.

Watch an easy to follow video about the issues here: http://vimeo.com/31100268