Special Edition: What is SOPA?

When you can count your page views on one hand, and you get three people asking for a particular topic, you're inclined to oblige. That being said, today's topic is bit more complex than I'd normally cover, but I feel fairly confident that I can explain this in a way everyone can understand.

SOPA- A.K.A. the "Stop Online Piracy Act" hopes to spur innovation and entrepenuership by preventing people from steal other people's copyrighted material. Sounds good, right? I'm a fan of new things, and I'm not a fan of people stealing things. The problem lies in how they do it though.

SOPA's original form (by the time this is read it's possible that it's been amended, so bear that in mind) contains language that would allow the US Department of Justice or the copyright holder to seek court orders that would:

A. Stop payment to the websites from any or all advertisements
B. Shut the website down temporarily.
C. Bar search engines from linking to the website.
D. All of the above.

Still doesn't sound too bad though, right? If a website is redistributing stolen goods it deserves to be shut down and punished, right? Well, here's the catch- the wording allows those things to happen not only to websites that knowingly do that, but also to websites who are unaware of it, or aren't actually doing anything wrong at all! Now, at this point you might be inclined to consider this "spin" by the liberal media or whatnot, but hang in there with me.

It does actually state that the above penalties can be enforced as soon as the alleged victim issues a complaint regardless of whether or not the claim turns out to be true. This would mean that YouTube would be down while it's under investigation if a teenage girl singing a Brittany Spears song counts as copyright infringement. It would mean that if ever someone posted a picture of a Coke can on Facebook it would also go down. Google would most likely cease to exist, or, if it did, it would be censored from every webpage that may-or-may-not potentially have copyrighted material.

If you hear your techie friends ranting about SOPA, you now know why. It is seen in the tech community as the largest threat to Internet censorship yet, and the Internet is the largest example of America's right to Freedom of Speech. When the Internet begins to become censored it will be viewed as the largest infringement of civil liberties yet.