I’m sure by now many of you have heard about the US House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the US Senate’s Protect IP Act. They are backed by the MPAA, big pharma, media companies, and the US Chamber of Commerce. Opposing the legislation are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla, Yahoo, and the US Department of Energy.

What the legislation would do is give the Justice Department the power to get court orders that would require websites found to be hosting content that violates copyrights to shut down, be removed from search engines, and be blocked by ISPs. What that means is that mixes, mashups, viral videos, and who knows what else would be ban and search engines and websites like Youtube, Wikipedia, and countless blogs could be found to be violating the law and face major consequences.

The problem here is that copyright laws by and large were written for the pre-digital era. You know, the time when to read somebody’s work, watch a movie, or listen to music required a TV or radio signal or going to the store to get a physical copy of it. If you wanted to make a video of you singing some random song you could only share it as far as you could physically get the tape. Heck, mashups would have been virtually impossible since the average person certainly wouldn’t have had any editing equipment.

That’s not the age we live in now. Today we use computers, tablets, and phones to access our media and many (if not most) have HD cameras, microphones, and enough processing power to produce a feature film. The distinction between content creators and consumers has blurred.

This legislation would effectively make every search engine, domain registry, and ISP full time copyright cops. But it goes further than that. SOPA would make it so that videos such as the “Born This Way” video that a middle school Gay Straight Alliance made and went viral, Symphony of Science videos, and who knows what other content illegal. Youtube, which already removes content found to be in violation of copyrights, would be at best unusable and a waste of your valuable time wasting.

Sure, copyright owners deserve to receive compensation for the use of their materials and yes much about the internet is broken, but the US government restricting something as free and inherently international as the internet is not the way to go. It’s government censorship and it sounds a lot like what countries like China and Iran are already doing.

If you want to express your disapproval of this take a few seconds and sign the petition.

Sources and more info:

• Washington Post – “SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) debate: Why are Google and Facebook against it?”
• OMG! Ubuntu – “Tomorrow The Internet Will Begin to Die”
• CNET News – “SOPA copyright bill draws fire”
• CNET News – “New flap over SOPA copyright bill: Anti-Web security”
• CNET News – “Sandia Labs: SOPA will ‘negatively impact’ U.S. cybersecurity”