Though news media outlets in recent days have focused an increasing amount of attention on the congressional debt supercommittee charged with cutting $1.2 trillion in spending from the national budget, there’s another piece of legislation being debated that doesn’t seem to be garnering as much attention as it deserves.
The House Judiciary Committee just sent a new bill to debate on the House floor entitled “Stop Online Piracy Act.” According to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), “SOPA” as the bill has come to be known, is designed to “promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property and for other purposes.”
If passed, the bill essentially gives the Justice Department the power to order Internet service providers to shut down websites that violate copyright laws through illegal distribution of copyrighted material.
The senate has already passed a similar bill, the “Protect IP” act, but the House bill grants much more power to the government.
Obviously Internet piracy has become an increasingly salient problem over the past decade. Most of us probably remember the Napster incident in 1999. However, this new legislation is not the right way to go about handling the problem. Internet giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo have been vehement in their opposition to this new bill. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is concerned that this bill “would require (Internet service providers) to remove URLs from the web, which is also known as censorship last time I checked.”
If the bill law doesn’t seem particularly threatening to you, consider this scenario: eBay relies heavily on companies like PayPal and Mastercard for its customers to make payments for transactions on the website. If a single copyright holder alleged that there were copyrighted material on eBay’s website, this law would allow them to contact PayPal and have them cut off access to the site. The legislation is far too sweeping and not nearly as narrowly tailored as it should be to address the problem it claims to solve.
Lawmakers claim that the law would mainly be used to target people selling goods illegally like prescription drugs, but that still doesn’t change how overly broad the language in the bill is. In a statement sent to Judiciary Committee written by such groups as Mozilla, Twitter and Google, the companies expressed their fear that “the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities, private rights of action, and technology mandates that would require monitoring of websites.”
Popular aggregator and blogging sites like Reddit and Tumblr have actively worked this week to mobilize their users to stand up against the bill. Tumblr replaced all of its users content with black censorship blocks and then gave users directions on how to contact their representative to voice their opposition to the bill.
I certainly hope that our representatives will consider these Internet users’ demands. For years the Internet has been a haven of free speech; its prosperity and growth can largely be attributed to its lack of regulation. While I don’t want to go sounding the Orwellian alarm by comparing this proposed law to regulations in China and Iran that block people’s abilities to see content the government wants to keep from them on the Internet, I am still nonetheless concerned about the possible ramifications of this law and I sincerely hope Congress will consider a less sweeping alternative.
Brandon Bub is a sophomore majoring in English and edits The Daily Campus opinion column. He can be reached for comment at [email protected]
