SOPA sparked mass protests against censorship
The controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), currently under consideration in the US Congress, has sparked unprecedented protests, primarily online. Several major websites shut down for 24 hours to alert ordinary internet users to the problem.
The SOPA bill was introduced in the US House of Representatives on October 26, 2011. Its main goal is to regulate the distribution of pirated content.
The document contains numerous controversial provisions that allow for the closure of any resource even without a court order. Furthermore, according to the document, copyright holders can demand that other companies, including payment systems, advertising services, as well as ISPs and hosting providers, cease cooperation with the infringing website.
In this case, US authorities can force a foreign resource to be declared a violator, in which case US companies will be obligated to restrict the resource's operation – blocking it from search results, restricting user access, and much more.
Furthermore, the law stipulates that if the US Department of Justice succeeds in finding a foreign website in violation, US payment and advertising services, search engines, and other internet companies will be required, by order of the Attorney General's Office, to restrict the website's operation. This means removing it from search results, blocking access to it for their subscribers, and so on.
Today, the English version of Wikipedia, the largest online encyclopedia, went down for 24 hours. More than six thousand websites also took part in the online protest, including the news site Reddit, the blogging site Tumblr, the Mozilla Foundation, which develops the Firefox browser, and the forum 4chan.
Most major services that host user-generated content have spoken out against the bill. Resources like Facebook and Twitter, in other words, those that publish UGC on their pages, will be harmed by the bill. The bill stipulates that the resource owner is responsible for user-generated content, even if it was posted without their knowledge. The flow of user-generated content on the modern internet is too vast to filter. Accordingly, SOPA is inherently impossible to implement, and the bill itself threatens the existence of the entire internet industry, the modern Web 2.0 internet.
A frequently cited example of how SOPA could be perversely applied if adopted is as follows: a copyright holder could contact the administration of a website that contains illegal or copyright-infringing content. The website owner could remove the content and be assured that they have fulfilled their obligations to the copyright holder. If SOPA is adopted, the copyright holder might not contact the website owner, but instead go directly to payment systems or advertising services and demand, for example, that their accounts be frozen or that they cease cooperation with the website.
The backlash surrounding SOPA was so great that companies that supported it lost thousands of customers, including the largest internet registrar, GoDaddy.
The protest around SOPA can be called an unprecedented protest against copyright. It could be the beginning of a reform of the entire copyright system, which is rightly considered obsolete in the modern digital world.
