Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as H.R.3261, was introduced in the US House of Representative on October 26, 2011 by Representative Lamar Smith and a bipartisan group of 12 initial co-sponsors. The aim of the bill is to help U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders fight online piracy of intellectual property. This bill “modernizes [United States] criminal and civil statutes to meet new IP enforcement challenges and protect American jobs."
The bill is divided into two Titles with the first focusing on combating foreign infringing websites, websites outside U.S. jurisdiction that enable or facilitate copyright infringement, and the second focusing on increased penalties to combat intellectual property theft via digital means.
Now it's intention is good, however the method it uses is severely flawed and will cause more harm then good. Acccording to this bill anyone infringing the copyright law or believed to be, will be punish. So to them, if a person is doing a cover song on Youtube of their favorite artist then they will get sue. Even the site will be shut down once they discover all the copyright material. From clips of shows, movies, songs used as background music, video games, cover songs and so on.
This also means that there will be no more fanart, fanfiction, icons, wallpaper, and anything else that uses copyrighted material. It will also mean that if someone says something horribly against that copyrighted material then they can be blocked. This bill gives companys that much power and it's another reason why many are against it. Such power will be abused. It's interferes with our right of freedom of speech.
Additionally, this doesn't effect US only. The internet is used by the whole world so if some copyrighted company believes that a site is violating something then that site will be blocked or sued. So that means that foreign countries won't be able to access those US based websites such as Deviantart, Tumblr, Wikipedia, Google, etc. the same as the US people. They will be missing out on them just as much as the Americans would be.
That's why people are so against it.
 DamnBlackHeart · Wed Jan 18, 2012 @ 07:57pm · 0 Comments |
