Last Thursday tallied both wins and losses for regular internet users in the ongoing battle of internet copyright laws and freedom of speech.
Both Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP’s Act were shelved in Congress. The bills would have allowed the government to shut down sites containing copyrighted material or links to copyrighted material.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. It’s not over even when it’s over,” English professor Charles Bernstein said.
Last Wednesday, Wikipedia, Reddit and Wordpress shut themselves down for 24 hours with hundreds of other websites, such as Google, making noticeable changes to their website design to raise awareness of SOPA.
The coordinated internet protest did what it had intended and showed politicians that their constituents felt strongly about the issue. After Wednesday’s blackout, the number of Congress members opposing the bill almost quadrupled from 31 to 122.
Yet even with SOPA shelved, there is still another bill with the same intent — except this one is already signed by the U.S. government.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is an international treaty that forces internet service providers — the companies who provide internet access to households — to monitor their users to make sure that they are not posting copyrighted content. Users who do post any form of copyrighted content can be fined and jailed for up to five years.
The act, according to European Digital Rights — a nonprofit watchdog organization — will have a similar effect on innovation as SOPA would, forcing undue litigation costs on technology start-ups that do not have the money to fight a costly legal battle.
The United States, along with Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea, have signed on to the agreement. If ratified by the Senate, ACTA will go into effect.
“To date, disturbingly little information has been released about the actual content of the agreement,” according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website.
The European Union is currently in debate over it, as the act currently fails to uphold the Council of Europe’s standards on the “protection and promotion of universality, integrity, and openness of the internet,” according to a document released by the Council of Europe.
Last Thursday was an example of government crackdown on file-sharing websites. Even with the public support for promoting free file-sharing on the internet, the government shut down the popular file-sharing website Megaupload and its affiliated video-streaming website Megavideo.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice released an official joint statement last Thursday saying that “this action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States and directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and distribution site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime.”
Many people find the coincidental shutdown of Megaupload right after the SOPA protest as government retaliation.
In response, Anonymous — an internet group that calls themselves “a loose coalition of internet denizens” — launched denial-of-service attacks on the websites of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Recording Industry Association of America, a few hours after Megaupload was shut down. The attack brought the two sites offline for the day.
Megaupload did host a variety of illegal copyrighted content, according to claims by the U.S. Government.
College freshman Nikhil Menezes thinks that the action was “at least partially justified, since Megaupload had illegal content on it that would have warranted the shutdown.”
Similarly, Dylan Petro, a sophomore in the College, thought that “from a purely legal standpoint Megaupload was infringing on a variety of laws.” He supports the shutdown of the website “since it broke legal lines.”
However, he was concerned that the “act would open up a well for less infringing sites, such as Dropbox and SoundCloud” that would result in those sites being taken down as well.
Related
Wikipedia, Wordpress shut down to oppose censorship
Alice Lee | Save the internet, #StopSOPA
Editorial | Beyond the blackout
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