American Censorship and SOPA

What rights do we have with regard to technology and the internet? Do we take for granted the access to the whole of the internet we enjoy in the United States? Many countries around the world either restrict access to parts of the internet, or monitor the actions of its users. An act called the Stop Online Piracy Act would allow the United States Department of Justice to blacklist any website they deemed to be violating copyright law without any notification.

The major organizations pushing for the bill are the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America are spending million of dollars on lobbyists to push the bill forward (and to have it created in the first place). Tech companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, and Mozilla oppose the bill because it would allow the government to fine, or shutdown sites such as YouTube which rely on user-submitted content for copyright infringment.

In response to the bill, some of these tech companies declared November 16th as American Censorship Day to protest the bill by placing the text CENSORED over their logos. Many other groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are also protesting the bill by writing articles comparing it to similar systems socialist countries such as the Great Firewall of China which blocks many U.S. Websites such as Facebook, Twitter and articles related to protests or non socialist forms of government.

Interestingly, firewalls and blacklists can be circumvented and rendered ineffective by a savvy user through a variety of means. For example, internet traffic can be encrypted and sent through a country that does not filter Internet access. People who illegally share copyrighted material on the internet fit this demographic quite accurately, so it is likely that the bill would fail to stop online piracy.

We've seen this before with the music industry: restricting users' rights with encryption doesn't work. Audio files from many leading music providers such as iTunes came encrypted with digital rights management designed to prevent playback on unauthorized devices. However because of the different methods of so called digital rights management, “unauthorized devices” meant a device made by a different company. Furthermore, this did nothing to stop music piracy. Unencrypted copies of tracks were either extracted from CDs, or the encryption on online downloads would be broken. The music industry eventually admitted defeat and Amazon began selling unencrypted music files in 2007. iTunes followed suit a two years later with the introduction of iTunes Plus which included unencrypted files.

The full title of the bill is “To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.” One of the biggest issues is how vague it is. Gotta love the “for other purposes,” because this bill would allow the U.S. government to block any website on the internet, something it can't do at the moment. Another interesting point is that while the bill wishes to foster creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation, the largest protesters are some of the most innovative companies in the world.

Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to set up an encrypted tunnel to another country or use Tor to avoid Internet filtering. Many people fear the result of the bill could set a precedent for American government filtering of any website they liked.

The problem with bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act is that they are written by politicians who are lobbied by large corporations many of which know comparatively little about the Internet. Until an understanding can be reached between media producers (studios, MPAA, RIAA), media distributes (Google, YouTube, Netflix) and consumers (Us), it is unlikely that anything will change.