Stopping SOPA

You may have noticed that my logo, along with many oth­ers on the web today, appears to have been cen­sored. That’s because today is Amer­i­can Cen­sor­ship Day, a day of online action against House Res­o­lu­tion 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act.

As any TNL.net read­ers know, there has long been a bat­tle between two groups on the Inter­net: those who believe that copy­right hold­ers should be given pref­er­en­tial treat­ment and those who believe the inter­net should be a level-playing ground. I am firmly in the lat­ter camp, even though I pro­duce large amounts of con­tent online.

A few years ago, Con­gress passed the Dig­i­tal Mil­len­nium Copy­right Act (aka DMCA), a law that, while some­what more aggres­sive than I’d like it, man­ages to strike a bal­ance between the inter­ests of both copy­right hold­ers and online sites by requir­ing that a take­down notice be sent to a site if you see infring­ing con­tent. The site then needs to honor or fight the take­down notice in court. The DMCA turned out to be a decent com­pro­mise pro­tect­ing the inter­ests of most peo­ple and things should prob­a­bly have stopped there.

But the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA for short) goes sub­stan­tially far­ther. It looks to assume guilt on the part of the site host­ing con­tent and looks to pro­vide a sys­tem that would put con­trol of inter­net domain names in the hands of the government.

Today, when you type TNL.net in your browser, that gets trans­lated into a set of num­bers known as an IP address (this is sim­i­lar to you look­ing up con­tacts in your address book instead of hav­ing to remem­ber that contact’s phone num­ber). What SOPA calls for is that if a copy­right owner finds one piece of infring­ing con­tent on a site, they could go to the gov­ern­ment and ask them to block that address. Peo­ple would still be able to access the site if they knew the IP address (and most pirates would)  but the reg­u­lar pub­lic would not be able to access the site by typ­ing its name. Sites like Face­book, Google, Twit­ter, Flickr, and other could imme­di­ately dis­ap­pear from the inter­net for a sin­gle pre­sumed act of copy­right sharing.

So I would urge you to con­tact your con­gressper­son in oppo­si­tion of SOPA today. Send­write has cre­ated a help­ful online tool to send phys­i­cal let­ters to your con­gressper­son. The few min­utes you put in will make it pos­si­ble for the inter­net to con­tinue existing.

Before you go, imag­ine two futures: in one, the inter­net becomes like TV, you don’t get to choose what’s on, when it’s on and where it’s on; in the other, the inter­net remains as it is today, a place where you can choose what you want to see, when you want to see and where you want to see it. Which future do you want? If it’s the lat­ter, con­tact your con­gressper­son today.