If you haven’t noticed already, a lot of websites on the Internet, including big ones like Reddit and Wiki­pe­di­a, are participating in a black-out to protest SOPA. Even The Badger Herald, the place where I work, shut down their website for the day.

Ever since information about SOPA and other related bills surfaced, a lot of people have been requesting a blog post with my opinions, seeing as I am a content producer and would be directly affected. When I received my first request back in November, I felt as if I did not know enough about the bills and held off; I still do not think I know enough about them to fully support my opinions, but today still seems like an appropriate day to write about this because of the black-outs.

First of all, we’ll start with the basics in case you have been (insert cliché about living beneath an ob­ject that I can’t remember here) (yes, I am bad at remembering clichés).

The main purpose of these new bills is to stop online piracy. The people who create content are suf­fer­ing because there are many people who do not legally purchase copies of digital media, and instead steal it by downloading it from unauthorized places (a popular example being the Pirate Bay; screenshot of the website shown below) without paying the content creator. The argument of if the content creators are actually suffering or if they already have enough money is another issue about which I do not yet have a well-supported opinion.

The bill seems like something that would be the moral and correct thing to do, and a lot of people, in­cluding myself, agree. However, even those who do not torrent or steal copyrighted content are op­posing the bill because of the methods it proposes to use in order to stop piracy. Instead of doing somewhat of an obvious thing and raiding the servers hosting torrent hubs like the Pirate Bay, they are in­stead targeting websites who link to copyrighted content without consent. For example, if I were to put a link to watch Inception online for free, this law would allow the producers and copyright holders of Inception to alert law enforcement and force my website to be blocked from being accessed.

The real problem arises from user-contributed content. If I put a link to Inception, I deserve to be shut down, but what if one of my readers did? What if comments were enabled on my website (which, at the moment, they are not on most pages), and one of my readers decides to put a link to watch Inception for free online? Regardless of who did it, my website would still be blocked. This puts collaborative web­sites (such as Facebook and YouTube, where the community is the one posting all the content) at great risk because they have millions of users, and some illegal content is prone to be posted somewhere and go unnoticed by moderators.

This discourages people from creating such websites. If this bill was passed before the creation of Facebook or YouTube, there is a chance that these websites might have never been born due to the possibility of the founders fearing that these websites would cause them to get into legal trouble. This stops the advancement of technology and puts a developmental halt on our society.

So overall, the essence of my opinion is that the idea behind SOPA and PIPA are good, but the way in which the bills plan on fulfilling their goals are not.