Just days before the end of 2011, the US House Judiciary Committee held its final hearings that year on the issue of SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act), a piece of legislation that sets out to “[expand] the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.” Building upon the lesser known PIPA (the PROTECT IP Act or, Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011), SOPA helped close out the year with controversy characterized by inflamed debate, widespread online hysteria, and hyperbole from supporters and detractors alike – most of which ironically took place on the very turf SOPA is targeting – our beloved information superhighway.
The content of SOPA is very complex, not so much in any sort of details that outline how piracy would be stopped, but because the language is extremely broad. Due to SOPA’s ambiguous language, it is easy to speculate on what the Internet may look like if SOPA becomes the law of the land in the United States. This alone has caused much of the agitation from copyright holders and digital freedom of speech activists alike.
The most basic understanding of SOPA was described in a November 2011 PC World-Business Center article. Essentially, the bill would “allow the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders to seek court orders requiring online advertising networks, payment processors and other organizations to stop payments to websites and Web-based services accused of copyright infringement.” Wikipedia, which has come out strongly against the bill, summarized its effect this way:
Depending on who requests the court orders, the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for 10 pieces of music or movies within six months. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.
This has created something of a schism between big media and technology companies seeking to protect their intellectual property from being pirated and in some cases, resold by what they have deemed as “rogue websites.” The situation becomes stickier when innovations or social networking sites created by these large companies allows for users to host or share content within its platform. One article recently noted:
If a ‘directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link’ is found to distribute content without permission, [SOPA] would allow copyright owners or the Attorney General to sue for the deletion of that Internet service from the United States Internet by rendering it unsearchable on search engines and impossible to access with United States DNS servers. (Security experts worry that this will cause Americans who still want to access sites like RapidShare to rely on foreign DNS servers, which would open another can of worms.) Certain protections are available — for example, the offending site has to be determined not to have significant non-infringing uses, which would appear to cover most of the services listed above. However, that is subject to interpretation. Even though Apple reportedly paid $100 million to the major labels for permission to launch the iCloud music locker, it could easily be argued that the majority of content stored there and on any other “legal” music locker service technically infringes on copyright.
This facet alone has caused the divide between big entertainment companies and big tech companies, all of which perceive SOPA differently based on their own interests both inside and outside of the market.
It’s rather clear what the entertainment industry hopes to get from SOPA. Clearly, it’s wrong when theft of creative, original–and copyrighted— data occurs. But, the opposition to the bill feels that this specific type of legislation is trying to kill a flea with cannon. SOPA opposition maintain that legal mechanisms already exist to identify and prosecute those in the game of malicious piracy and that those mechanisms could be applied more effectively. The passing of SOPA, they contend, would, to use the old adage, throw the baby out with the bathwater.
For a strong summarization of those arguments against SOPA and PIPA, consider this short video produced by LifeHacker in response to the bill.
Despite the opposition to the bill, the entertainment industry is arguing that even digital writers—journalists, bloggers, developers—should be concerned about protecting their own original content and SOPA would ultimately allow them to prosecute the plagiarism of their original ideas. In response to this argument, Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN journalist, told Bloomberg in an interview that, “the problem is, who decides what is copyright infringement? If you’re setting up a system of blacklisting websites at the national level you’re basically installing a censorship mechanism that is almost identical, technically, to the mechanism the Chinese use to censor their Internet, […] that the Iranians use, and so on.”
Nevertheless, just hours after the final hearings on SOPA occurred on December 15th, anti-SOPA Internet users began to organize a boycott against the bill’s largest supporters. The first target was GoDaddy.com. When GoDaddy.com, the largest ICANN-accredited registrar in the world, announced its overwhelming support for SOPA, Internet users collectively acted—with much organizing occurring through Reddit.com—and boycotted the service. Over the 2011 Christmas holiday, GoDaddy lost over 37,000 domains in a matter of a few days, effectively forcing the company to discontinue its support for SOPA. Later Republican congressman Paul Ryan reversed his stance on SOPA following pressure from Reddit users.
An incomplete list of companies, websites and organizations supporting and opposing SOPA can be found here, along with what should be assumed to be an incomplete list and analysis of the money trail backing the bill’s legislation.
So what does all of this mean for the future of data? Much is uncertain, and it’s important for those in the data management game not to speculate too much about the future of the Internet. However, the last few weeks should teach all those interested in data governance just how important it is to be aware of not only which service is hosting their content, data, and information, but also which political stance these services hold when it comes to legislation like SOPA.
Despite where one finds his or herself on the issue of SOPA, the debate is sure to arise again once Congress returns from winter recess. For the short term, we can all continue to enjoy the net as it is. For the long term, however, back up your data and hold on to your hard drives – we’re in for a bumpy ride.
