By now you are hearing rumblings about SOPA and PIPA, but do you know what they are and why they are important?
SOPA and PIPA
SOPA is the House of Representative’s “Stop Online Piracy Act” bill. PIPA is the Senate’s “Protect IP Act” bill, having a subheading of “Prevent Real Online Threat to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property.” It would appear that the initial intent of SOPA and PROTECT IP was to target overseas websites that host pirated copies of movies, music, TV shows, or stream live sports events. An estimated $200 billion revenue is lost from the people who worked to create the pirated material. The U.S. law would force american credit card providers (Visa, MasterCard, etc) to stop processing transactions for sites that the courts found infringing those copyrights.
This sounds fair right? Everyone should be repaid for the work they do. However what is being called into question regarding these bills is the methodology the government is planning to use to punish violators.
Why the Reaction
The provision that is creating some of the strongest reaction in both the SOPA and PIPA bills would allow the federal courts to order internet service providers (ISPs), the people you get your internet service from, and search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) to block websites that they determine to infringe upon copyrights and trademarks primarily of the american entertainment industry.
What Would Happen
In the case of an ISP it would affect the user by rerouting the requested address to a notice about how the request website was in violation of copyright laws or post a “404 error” stating the website could not be found. In very real terms this means that the government would have the ISP lie about the non-existence of a website.
Regarding search engines, the bill would have them filter out an offending site from the results posted for a general keyword query. For a direct search of the site by name, they too would be required to say the site didn’t exist.
Consequences
While a person could think this doesn’t affect them, there may be unintentional ramifications that need to be considered. While a there seem to be much support from those making their living in the entertainment industry, questions are being raised as to how far reaching these bills could be in other arenas.
A new security protocol, called Secure DNS or DNSSEC, has recently been implemented by many internet service providers to authenticate IP addresses on target sites. These bills would be in direct opposition to this security protocol. Paul Vixie, chairman and chief scientist at the Internet Systems Consortium in Redwood City, Calif., has said “Secure DNS can tell you when you’re being lied to, but it can’t tell if those lies are due to a law like PROTECT IP or due to criminal interference. If you know you’re being lied to, but you don’t know whether it’s a lawful lie, then what should you do? It turns out that PROTECT IP would make Secure DNS useless.”
As with any technology, anyone willing to put in the time and effort will find a way around any blockages the government might erect. What that will mean for the rest of us is the potential filtering of the internet in the content we have access to.
It also has the potential for the U.S. to a different set of network addresses for our DNS servers from the rest of the world. It would cause users to “see” a different Internet than someone in another part of the world, not based on personal choices, but based on governmental controls. This is what has happened in China, Iran, and other countries where users were blocked from seeing content the government didn’t like.
Support and Opposition
There is support and opposition on this issue. Many in the entertainment and business industry are backing the current bills. Much of the opposition has been portrayed tech geeks who would be most affected, but their ranks are swelling with credible entities as well. Google, Yahoo, eBay, and others oppose the bills. Domain retailer, GoDaddy, has reversed its support recently. A day of protest in opposition of SOPA is happening Wednesday January 18, 2012 when websites will voluntarily go offline for 24 hours to highlight the potential loss of access users could experience should the bills pass.
Supporters: coldfirepromotions.com/list-of-sopa-supporters
SOPA Blackout Participants: socyberty.com/subcultures/the-sopa-pipa-blackout-list and http://www.sopastrike.com
This is an awesome article explaining more about the issue: www.securitynewsdaily.com/congress-sopa-protectip-break-internet-1333
Stop American Censorship link: www.americancensorship.org
Stay informed
Mary Ellen
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