Beginning Research ~ 2

Technology:
The big hammer of SOPA, PIPA will only crush Internet freedom

Andy Ihnatko reflects about the controversy that sprung up about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) through the House of Representatives and the Senate. There is lots of ager targeted at SOPA and PIPA. However, outrage against SOPA and PIPa shouldn't sweep aside the obvious ethical, legal, and monetary problems inherent in content piracy. These Acts are mostly designed to deal with sites that are outside of US jurisdiction. They 'just want the same legal tools for fighting digital piracy as other industries have for physical piracy.' The down side is, that copyright holders could then issue a court order that simply makes the offending foreign website invisible to any user in America. Free-speech sites would no longer be able to continue. No more Wikipedia. No more Google. There are both up sides and down sides to these Acts. Many incidents demonstrate how easily powers like these can be abused to control speech on the Internet. SOPA and PIPA have been making progressively- denser stinks over the past couple months as more and more people have examined it and seen how poorly built and over-reaching they are. If the success of the Internet can be attributed to one basic principle it's this: information should move freely from one place to another without restrictions. Many people believe that SOPA and PIPA, not only are over reacting and restricting freedoms, they are most likely not even realistic. They might be able to help stop piracy to a certain extent, but would never be able to completely prevent it. 

Andy Ihnatko