SOPA and PIPA and what they mean

Greetings PMC

As someone with a degree and job in the computing industry, allow me to enlighten you from my research.

First, SOPA = PIPA(PRO-IP). SOPA, which stands for Stop Online Piracy Act, is the House of Representatives version of a potential 'solution' to online piracy. PRO-IP, or the Protect IP Act, is the Senate proposal for how to halt online piracy of media. Both of these initiatives are funded by the entertainment industry which feels that it is losing large volumes of money to digital piracy, this being primarily TV, movies, and music, though games and print are in there to a lesser extent.

What SOPA and PRO-IP do is give powers to copyright holders to force a site down for infringing copyrighted material. The weapons that these potential bills give are varied and dangerous, though the wording is far too loose to be safe. The biggest reason that these are dangerous is that they would give copyright holders the power to decide what is infringement, instead of following minor things like freedom of speech and fair use.

What could happen is that copyright holders (say a record company) decide that they do not like the video you posted of yourself whistling one of their songs in the shower on YouTube. YouTube is told that they must take the video down, or else. The law says that if YouTube tries to do so, they are immune to further retaliation from the copyright holder. If they do not, the copyright holder can tell the people that post ads on YouTube not to do so, they can make the company that processes payments stop, they can tell Google not to link to them, they can tell your service provider not to allow the domain to translate. All of these would kill a website very quickly, unless a method to get around these were used.

There are already several programs and plugins that do just that, since they do not have the power to actually bring YouTube down, just burn the roads there. You would still be able to directly connect to the website with an IP address (that crazy string of numbers that you use to connect to a Minecraft server sometimes) if you knew it, and there are some programs that already bypass the US domain servers. This would also not stop piracy, because they would just do the same thing they have always do.

Something stupid is that provisions against individual piracy already exist, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is what is used by YouTube if you decide that your sweet Minecraft video would be cooler with Daft Punk in the music. When you do this, you will be told that your video contains copyright material and is not allowed. This is not the sort of thing that needs to be attacked as piracy. Piracy that should be attacked is where a site would have instances like that that were original content, that being a few among many, instead of where the original and fair use content was the many among the few.

Because of the powers provided to special interest groups and the absence of due process and checks and balances, not to mention the potential undermining of the security of the internet backbone that would be required of the DNS system to allow this sort of work, this set of initiatives cannot be allowed to pass. As you may have already heard, Wikipedia and Reddit are both going to be dark on 1/18/2012, which is the day that there will be a discussion within the capitol regarding these proposals.

The voting will not take place until approximately 1/23/2012 and neither of these have passed at this time. Specifically, the portion regarding modification of the Domain Name System has been criticized by the White House and is set to be removed from the proposals. The most likely outcome if they do manage to become bills to be voted on by the House and Senate instead of simply being created in committees is that the two proposals would be combined in some form.

In support of the protests for something that is not nearly well enough thought out to safely be made into a law (they have no-one thinking like the bad guy about this), I am going to be shutting my Minecraft and Terraria servers down for the day this Wednesday. I request that all server owners join and host some sort of protest of this act, whether it be shutting your servers off for the day, changing your Message of the Day, or hosting a building contest, please do something to fight this potential legislation.

TL;DR: SOPA = PIPA, Both can break the internet without oversight, they are not well-thought, my servers will be down Wednesday, join me.

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