by Jessica Breger
Staff writer
The ongoing conflict between Hollywood and Silicon Valley (home of many American-based tech and Internet companies) has been prominent lately as two Congressional bills have been attracting attention this month.
The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, being considered by the House of Representatives and the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, being considered by the Senate, are bills meant to prevent online piracy such as illegal downloads of movies and music.
CNN.com reveals that the bills would accomplish this by restricting American citizens’ access to foreign sites that participate in online piracy.
These sites, such as The Pirate Bay, would be “flagged” and stricken from search engines like Google and Ask.com.
Flagged sites would also be stricken from payment processors like PayPal. No account information going to or from flagged sites would be processed.
This would mean sites flagged as being associated with illegal piracy could not receive payment from American citizens.
The goal is to cut ties between foreign torrent hubs and American citizens using them to illegally download copyrighted material.
The anti-piracy law now in place is called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and was implemented in 1998. This law restricts the ability of people to illegally upload copyrighted material to American-based sites.
According to CNN.com, under this law, American-based sites such as Youtube can be notified by the copyright holder that a user has uploaded copyrighted material.
The site must then notify the user and have the user take the material off. The site is protected as long as the material is taken down in a timely manner.
The American government cannot control all offending sites, however, because many of them are not based in America.
The idea with the new bills is to make it more difficult to access the offending sites in an effort to stop piracy in America.
The bills have raised concerns among Internet companies, the public and several political figures about censorship and First Amendment rights.
Those opposed to the bills are also reportedly concerned about the legal repercussion of the broad wording of the bills, according to a blog created by StumbleUpon, a site that allows its users to “stumble” random sites.
Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe (R) expressed his opposition to the bills in a press release Wednesday, Jan. 18: “It is clear to me that this bill will inflict too heavy a burden on third-party non-infringing entities and could do serious harm to one of the last vestiges that is relatively free from government regulation, the Internet.”
Inhofe goes on to say the requirements of the bill could “negatively impact the Internet’s reliability and performance.”
StumbleUpon’s blog outlines many concerns it and similar user-based sites have about the bills. The Internet and tech companies claim these bills can hinder sites like Google, Wikipedia, Facebook and Youtube.
The bill is designed so that payment processors, ad services and hosting providers bear the responsibility to block “offending” sites within five days of receiving a notification of a site’s offense.
The blog states that this time span does not give an appropriate amount of time needed to investigate the offense and that many companies express concern that these actions open a gateway to censorship and unjust “blacklisting” of entire sites.
The blog claims “…they will likely shut off services to entire web sites altogether, effectively shutting down entire business operations.”
On Wednesday, Jan. 18, more than 18,000 sites “went dark” in protest of the SOPA and PIPA bills, according to americancensorship.org.
On that day, Wikipedia shut down the English portion on its site for 24 hours. Google put a censor bar over its logo with a link to its own “End Piracy, Not Liberty” petition when a user clicked on the logo.
The Los Angeles Times reported on Jan. 18 that Google claims over 4.5 million people signed the petition.
Comedy and game sites such as Funny or Die and Newgrounds joined in the “black out” as well.
Upon entering these sites, users were greeted with serious messages against the bills rather than jokes.
While the sites all say that they agree that there need to be a stop to online piracy, they don’t agree that these bills are the right course of action.
Each site participating in the blackout has its own blogs outlining similar concerns about the censorship they would have to perform to be in accordance to the bills.
While the Internet and tech companies expressed concerns against the bills, mainstream Hollywood showed support.
Authors, movie companies and music companies feel these bills may help stop the “theft of U.S. property,” reported CNN.com
The bills would help ensure that the products these companies create would have to be purchased rather than illegally downloaded.
Congress was to vote on the bills on Tuesday, Jan. 24, but the decision to postpone the vote was made on Fiday, Jan. 20.
This decision was made due to a “public outcry” that caused the bills to lose support from both the Senate and the House, said Jocelyn Roger, desk secretary to Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole (R).
This does not mean the bills are gone forever. They are being revised with the intention of creating a bill that can effectively stop online piracy in America while still allowing free speech and flow of information on the Internet.
On Cole’s Facebook page, he stated, “While it’s important to protect copyrighted American products from online theft, I share your concerns that the current forms of these bills pose serious threats to free speech and free enterprise.”
“Congress is working on alternatives to these bills, and I would appreciate your continued input as the legislation is amended during the legislative process,” wrote Cole.