Chris Cullen
Staff Writer
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a bill intending to fight off Internet piracy and keep the entertainment industry from losing money.
If passed, anyone using third-party material without the owner’s permission could have their website deleted and receive up to five years in prison.
It may have seemed like a good idea to Congress at its initial proposal, but recent criticism has shed some light on how horribly planned and unbelievably stupid this bill is.
SOPA doesn’t limit itself to one specific media. It applies to every copyrighted material in existence on the Internet.
Everything from songs to pictures and art will be seen as copyright infringement. This means people could serve up to five years in prison for simply uploading a song with its lyrics in the description on YouTube.
Any company that remotely uses copyrighted material could be shut down. This would include YouTube, which is full of covered songs, and pop culture parodies. Facebook could get cited for users posting said YouTube videos on their walls. Even Google would be in trouble for being able to search copyrighted content.
In response to SOPA and other bills, over 115,000 websites protested by “blacking-out” on January 13, by fully or partially blocking access to their content, according to The New York Times.
This uproar proved very effective. Originally, on January 24, Congress was going to vote on PIPA, a companion bill to SOPA. Now the vote has been postponed indefinitely.
The sponsors of SOPA have been so frightened they’ve put off discussing the bill. And that’s how SOPA should stay.
Take a moment to imaging the dystopian world that would result if SOPA was actually passed.
Hollywood would have much more money, musicians would be unable to cover or remix popular songs, artists would only be able to draw certain characters in pop culture when being paid for it, parodies of popular fiction would not exist in the media, and obtaining free information for last-minute book reports would take much more time.
