Anthony Bouchard

Censorship. It’s a word that we all abhor to hear because it means that we will be left out in the dark about something. It’s a word that brings questionable actions to our minds. It means, “You can’t see that.”

As kids you may have remembered when your parents used to keep things away from you until you were older. This is a minor example of censorship. But now that you’re all adults, you would think that censorship would be unwarranted because you are all old and mature enough to take what is handed to you seriously and deal with it in a mature manner. Unlike when we were kids; we now have developed minds that understand right from wrong. When we were kids it was up to our parents to teach us right from wrong. Hopefully, your parents did a good job raising you and now you can join the world in what we call life. Granted, there are still people in this world that continue to break laws regardless of their age, they are now old enough to deal with the consequences. There is no more time out, or spanking. You will be fined large amounts of money or locked up in prison to do hard time. Now, when you do something wrong, your mom will not scold you. Instead, a judge will look down upon you like a maggot and decide your fate in front of a jury made from our surrounding citizens.

November 16th, 2011 is a day that will go down in history. It is the day that S.O.P.A. (Stop Online Piracy Act) [Author: Lamar Smith] was heard by congress. It was a House Judiciary Committee hearing which introduced the bill. In the hearing, lawmakers shared their opinions on the bill. The bill has one goal: stop the illegal sharing of Copyrighted media, software, and intellectual material.

The bill has a moral structural foundation behind it. It aims to stop the illegal sharing of people’s work through the loophole of foreign servers which are out of bounds of United States’ laws. The U.S. has no control over what is stored or shared in non-U.S. territory. This means that anyone who has access to the internet can easily access these servers to gain access to the non-legitimately shared material. The U.S. is hoping to break internet connections to these foreign servers to help reduce piracy in the U.S.

Here’s the problem.

S.O.P.A. gives the U.S. government the ability to watch over the internet. This gives them the discrete power to see what websites are visited and by whom. This information is granted to the government through your I.S.P. (Internet Service Provider). The I.S.P. is required by law to keep a prolonged history of all of their users’ actions on the internet. This gives the government the data that they need to find and shut down access to troublesome web servers. It also gives them information about who accessed the information so that they can prosecute the offender for copyright infringement.

This is the Patriot Act of the internet. It allows the government to wiretap activity of your searches, downloads, and histories. There is a loophole in the S.O.P.A. The loophole has to do with I.S.P.’s. Albeit the S.O.P.A. gives the government discrete power to view and search through the information that I.S.P.’s log, they do not require cellular service providers to log any of their users’ usage. What does this mean? It means that you could technically tether to your iPhone, or smartphone, or mobile hotspot without having your confidential information snooped through. It seems too good to be true that cellular service might be your way out of being censored, although most cellular providers are offering data caps on their data plans now. You’re not going to get much done on 2GB of data while you are gaming on a P.C. or reading and writing email, blogging, and surfing the web on a computer. That kind of data will add up promptly. So this idea is almost unheard of.

Large corporations such as AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo, and Zynga have openly rejected the authenticity and fairness of this Act. They trust that the Act is a violation on Americans’ rights to view and speak freely without slanderous intentions. S.O.P.A. would give the government power to shut down Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, and other completely law-abiding social media sites that offer any kind of, “inappropriate content.” That being said, this Act is far more dangerous than an anti-piracy bill. It gives the government the last say in which websites are worth being deemed a threat to the internet. Does this sound familiar yet? It should. Earlier this year, the Senate was hit with a similar bill called the Protect IP Act, which Ground Report reports was attacked by 100 law professors all of which discerned that the bill was unconstitutional. They further explained, “The Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that governmental action to suppress speech taken prior to 'a prompt final judicial decision . . . in an adversary proceeding' that the speech is unlawful is a presumptively unconstitutional 'prior restraint.'”

The open definition of S.O.P.A. is stated in its purpose, “Establish a system for taking down websites that the Justice Department determines to be dedicated to copyright*infringement. The DoJ or the copyright owner would be able to commence a legal action against any site they deem to have "only limited purpose or use other than infringement," and the DoJ would be allowed to demand that search engines, social networking sites and domain name services block access to the targeted site. It would also make unauthorized web streaming of copyrighted content a felony with a possible penalty up to five years in prison.”

Many are flustered by this Act, proposed by Lamar Smith. Unfortunately, lawmakers are in unanimous agreement with the Act. The House Judiciary Committee welcomed six witnesses. Five of the six witnesses testified in favor of the law despite the fact that there was only one who opposed it.

The biggest problem about S.O.P.A. is that it’s so poorly conceived. It’s so broad in its motives that it could potentially destroy completely legitimate Web Sites. It’s a relentless bill that will not rest until the people of the U.S. speak out. You might have seen some to be un-named websites advertising banners similar to the one below:



Should S.O.P.A. be passed? Tell us why or why not in the comments.

Sources: Ground Report