PIPA AND SOPA

Sopa (stop online piracy act) and pipa (protect IP act) were a series of bills in the US Congress that would have a created a "blacklist" for certain websites. These bills were defeated by a huge online campaign started by EFF and a handful of other organizations, which culminated in the Internet Blackout on January 18, 2012.

You may ask, why does this matter to us? Well I’ll tell you! If PIPA and SOPA go through, over 7,000 websites will shut down, including YouTube. Another question you might ask is, why would the do that just to stop copyrighting? Yes, I realize copyrighting is bad, but I don’t think they should completely shut down over 7,000 websites because of it. The reason they are doing this is because Hollywood wants the money from the people watching the movies or listening to the songs. If we are streaming or downloading a movie for free that is money Hollywood could have gotten.

What are other reasons why PIPA and SOPA are bad? They will not do anything to solve the problem. This is the biggest point. In the past 35 years, dating back to the 1976 Copyright Act, the legacy content industries have gone back to Congress an astounding sixteen times and gotten them to expand copyright law in some form or another to deal with their own inability to adapt. That's just about every two years. And what has any of it done to reduce the amount of infringement? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But now this is suddenly the magic bullet? Putting massive liability and compliance costs on startups will hinder the most necessary innovation and jobs. As described above, these bills work by making tech companies responsible for creating/policing the blacklist. That's expensive and daunting. Many startups won't even bother to work on innovative services because the legal fees will just be too high. Others will simply start elsewhere. At a time when startups are the only net creator of jobs these days, do we really want to burden them all with significant new compliance costs and liability? These bills are jobs and innovation killers. These bills will be abused. Just like every copyright law that's been passed. It's common knowledge that the DMCA is widely abused to take down content that is not infringing. But, at least with the DMCA it's targeted at specific content. With SOPA, entire sites will be taken down. Supporters insist that a "court reviews" these, and so there's no worry there. Tell that to Dajaz1.com, the blog that was incorrectly seized and censored for over a year with no due process under existing law (something we should definitely be revisiting). How can we say the new law won't be abused when the old law is already regularly abused?

In my opinion I think copyrighting is wrong but I don’t think they should shut down over 7,000 websites because of it. Hollywood just wants its money for the movies, songs, and TV shows.

https://www.eff.org/issues/coica-internet-censorship-and-copyright-bill

http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

http://www.pcworld.com/article/248298/sopa_and_pipa_just_the_facts.html