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SOPA, PIPA Blackouts Are Working

Thursday, January 19, 2012 3:18

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by Bob Adelmann

After months of discussion between and among 1,800 contributors to Wikipedia, the online information source, it decided to “go black” on Wednesday to protest the dangers in two bills that threaten the freedom of the Internet. Many other websites are also participating in today’s protest.

The bills are the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

According to Wikipedia, the proposed legislation would put “the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won’t have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors even if copyright isn’t being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted which means they won’t show up in major search engines. And SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.”

Ostensibly to reduce piracy, the bills overreach greatly. A single perceived violation, for instance, could get an entire website shut down or starved to death through forced cessation of payment processing or delivery of advertising to the website. How this might work if the bills become law is expalained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Etsy [an online marketplace for handmade goods] has over 800,000 active “shops”… — far too many for Etsy to monitor manually. Further, because of the eclectic nature of goods listed, it’s difficult to technically filter through the objects listed.

All that means that it’s not feasible for Etsy to proactively prevent listings that may be perceived to violate US copyright or trademark law. That’s a problem, because under SOPA, anybody who is a “holder of an intellectual property right harmed by the activities” of even a portion of the site, could serve Etsy’s payment processors with a notice that would require them to suspend Etsy’s service within 5 days. That means that a trademark violation in one of the storefronts could lead to payment suspension across the entire site.

If a site like Etsy is forced to proactively review every single item its sellers put up for sale, then Etsy no longer has a business model that will work. And the same would be true for Facebook, or YouTube, or any other site that incorporates user-generated activity as part of its business plan. Suddenly, we’re back to the old model, with that familiar centralization of authority and control and disenfranchisement of the masses….

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