After a December post to Reddit suggested moving away from Go Daddy, a major domain registering company that volubly supported both SOPA and PIPA- the Protect IP Act-, nearly 80,000 domain names were transferred to other services, according to Fight For The Future's SOPA timeline.
On January 20, 2012, Congress postponed voting indefinitely. However, SOPA and related copyright protection acts could easily return. Understanding how these bills fit into criminology precedents is important to anyone who uses and derives value from content found off the internet. Although the aim of SOPA is important, there are vast consequences to the bill. For example, a group of students creating a video for their online school project may decide to use a Kanye West song in the background of their original video. In response, Roc-A-Fella Records could accuse the students of copyright infringement and it could be taken down without due process.
The ostensible aim of SOPA was to reduce piracy and intellectual property infringement from foreign sites. To do so, it would remove access to their URL from search engines. While this could in fact have occurred, the wording of the proposed bill unfortunately allowed for severe violations not just to copyright infringers but also content creators who major corporations simply accused of copyrighting information.
For instance, according to First Amendment lawyer and Internet policy expert Marvin Ammori, “Any tool that helps anyone 'circumvent' the bills' remedies are illegal...any American sites that permit you to search for, or find, The Pirate Bay's new domain is potentially liable for circumvention.” This means that sites must subject their users to an arguably insupportable level of scrutiny to prevent a stray comment, Facebook status, social media tag, video response, or any of countless communication tools in constant use from jeopardizing their legal standing. An entire service must be responsible for all content of every user.
In addition, the State Department could order advertisers, domain name system (DNS) providers, and payment processors like Paypal to dissociate themselves from any site even accused of wrongdoing, resulting in millions of dollars in potential revenue loss for them all. Through the “market-based” system too-vaguely defined in SOPA, private entities such as entertainment companies could compile lists of offensive or even suspicious sites, and demand that they be cut off from financial support long before any possible legal hearing takes place.
Because due process is not required under SOPA, the potential for abuse is massive. And not only large businesses would face handicapping from this bill. Small business owners who make their livelihood from intellectual property, such as artists and photographers, are already suffering under language in the current Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) law. The DMCA has provisions that encourage baseless accusations of copyright infringement, resulting in scare tactics that bring down websites- often an individual artist's sole source of income- without formal charges. Like the DMCA, SOPA would allow media companies and lawyers to put pressure against competitors simply by accusing them of copyright infringement.
Protecting companies from copyright infringement is not intrinsically a bad thing. Online piracy is without question a problem that needs to be addressed. However, until proper language is formulated to protect free speech, the kinds of bills being proposed to attack piracy must have appropriate oversight to prevent misuse.
