The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is an anti-piracy bill running around Congress that would allow the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.
In other words, the beating heart of SOPA is the interest of intellectual property owners to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim.
If passed, online advertising networks and payment facilitators would be blocked from business with accused websites, barring search engines from linking to them and all access to the websites. This heresy system inherently evokes immunity among Internet services that take action in “good faith” against any website.
How could this affect Twitter and Facebook?
Social media sites will be criminalized for every copyright violation that their users commit. This means that sites like Facebook will be forced to proactively censor user content. The reason they can be held accountable is because SOPA fails to distinguish between commercial and non-commercial conduct. For example, if someone shares a pirated YouTube video on Facebook, both YouTube and Facebook will face penalization. As you can imagine, this only gets increasingly complicated when you consider the current popularity and profile of social media platforms.
The potential for abuse in this unchecked system threatens the life expectancy of the entire Internet. With the White House openly against SOPA, the House of Representatives is fixated in favor of the unbelievable idea.
Others against are pleading the First Amendment, Internet censorship and the death of the net. Whether whistle-blowing and free speech actions will be taken into consideration is unknown. Recent debates have been November 16, 2011, December 15, 2011 and the next is set for February 2012.
In the meantime, anti-SOPA actions are taking place today, January 18 with planned service blackouts by Internet leaders such as Wikipedia, BoingBoing, WordPress, TwitPic, and Google – in addition to petition drives. Later this afternoon, an anti-SOPA rally will take place in NYC, boycotting companies that support the legislation.
Here’s a list of companies supporting SOPA… so what are your views?