SOPA threatens the future

Today many prominent websites will go dark to protest the USA’s “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) and the “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act” (PROTECT IP).

The large, rapacious corporations and their bought-and-paid-for Congresscritters who are behind this bill are trying to paint it as protecting creators’ rights against pirates. In fact, it doesn’t do much for creators at all. What it does do is protect the rights of mega-corporations — who don’t create anything; they merely own things — to smash any competition and ensure that they and they alone remain the gateways you have to go through (and pay) to access any content online.

SOPA will require the company hosting your website to take it down, and will require Google and other search engines to delete your website from their search results, and will require Visa and Mastercard and PayPal to stop paying you any money they owe you. They will have to do this when a company accuses you of using copyrighted material — not proves that you are, but accuses you of doing so. In other words, you are not “presumed innocent until proven guilty”; rather, you are presumed guilty and a sentence is imposed on you until and unless you can prove, to your accuser’s satisfaction, that you have not done whatever it is they accuse you of.

Copyright expert Michael Geist spells it out:

the law envisions requiring Internet providers to block access to the sites, search engines to remove links from search results, payment intermediaries such as credit-card companies and PayPal to cut off financial support, and Internet advertising companies to cease placing advertisements.

If you think that this Act won’t affect us here in Canada, or in the rest of the world, think again. For the purposes of this Act, the USA treats Canada (and twenty Carribbean countries) as subject to American domestic law. It doesn’t matter if what you do is legal in your country; if Disney accuses your website of posting a picture of Mickey Mouse without their permission, your site is gone from the Internet.

And in order to file a challenge to the sentence against you, you must first consent to the jurisdiction of the American legal system. In other words, if you want to stand up to the bully, you have to agree that the bully has the right to beat you up if he thinks you haven’t stood up to him well enough on his own terms.

Further, this Act compels enforcement by breaking the infrastructure of the Internet: it hijacks the DNS registration system to make accused websites inaccessible (see this explanatory video). You’ll type in MyWebsite.com, but your ownership of that domain name has been stolen and re-routed. The cost of this technological change will be enourmous, and will open up exciting new avenues for hackers to steal your personal and financial information or otherwise harm you — and it won’t even be effective in eliminating access to the accused websites.

Heckuva job, Hollywood! Heckuva job, RIAA! Heckuva job, Congress! Heckuva job, authoritarians!

(Next battle: Stop the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA), the international censorship treaty being negotiated behind closed doors.)

Further information

• Cory Doctorow: “Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing”. Boing Boing: December 2011. Read it
• Michael Geist: “Geist: U.S. could claim millions of Canadian domain names in piracy battle”. Toronto Star: November 13, 2011. Read it (and see also Geist’s blog)
• Jason Harvey: “A technical examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP”. Reddit: January 17, 2012. Read it
• Joel Hruska: “How SOPA could actually break the Internet”. Extreme Tech: December 19, 2011. Read it
• Chase Kell: “The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and what it means for Canadians” The Right Click: December 20, 2011 Read it
• “Key Issues: Rogue Websites Legislation”. Public Knowledge.org Read it
• Julian Sanchez: “How SOPA Will Be (Ab)Used”. TechDirt: December 19, 2011. Read it
• Michelle Schusterman: “Infographic: Why the movie industry is so wrong about SOPA”. Matador Network: January 17, 2012 Read it
• Lucas Shaw: “Hollywood’s Anti-Piracy Campaign Runs Aground”. The Wrap: January 17, 2012. Read it
• “SOPA: The Internet Blacklist Bill”. American Censorship: 2011. Read it