As some of you may have noticed a number of websites across the internet have “gone dark” today. Wikipedia, BoingBoing, and Reddit for example and Google has blacked out their logo.

This has been done in protest of two bills currently in consideration by congress. H.R. 3261 “Stop Online Privacy Act” or SOPA and S.968 “Protect IP” or PIPA which could drastically alter the landscape of the internet as we have come to know it.

The EFF has a good summary of what these bills will do.

Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the Internet blacklist legislation as a new way to battle online infringement. But innovation and free speech advocates know that this initiative will do little to stop infringement online. What it will do is compromise Internet security, inhibit online expression, and slow growth in the technology sector.

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet’s underlying infrastructure. The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to block users’ attempts to reach certain websites’ URLs.

Let me jump in here. This would be done using DNS filtering the same technology that repressive regimes like China and Iran use to prevent their citizens from freely surfing the internet. In fact supporters of the bill provided a list of countries where this DNS filtering technology already works which includes, China, Iran, Bahrain, Myanmar, Syria, and others.

I would like the think that we in the US hold ourselves to a higher standard then these countries when it comes to censorship.

In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the Internet grows increasingly balkanized.

It gets worse: the blacklist bills’ provisions would give corporations and other private parties new powers to censor foreign websites with court orders that would cut off payment processors and advertisers. Broad immunity provisions (combined with a threat of litigation) would encourage service providers to overblock innocent users or even block websites voluntarily. This gives content companies every incentive to create unofficial blacklists of websites, which service providers would be under pressure to block without regard to the First Amendment.

Service providers would be forced to monitor and police their users’ activities as well, threatening the DMCA safe harbors that have been vital to online innovation over the last decade. SOPA gives the government new powers to go after sites that provide information about tools that might be used to bypass the blacklists — even though these are often the same tools used by democratic activists around the world to bypass Internet censorship mechanisms implemented by authoritarian governments like Iran and China.

If you believe that this is extreme consider the lawsuit that Viacom is trying to revive against YouTube/Google. Under the current law, the DMCA, there is a safe harbor provision which shields a website from liability of copyright infringement of users activity if they are not aware of it and they remove the offending content once notified by the copyright holder.

This means if I upload a video to YouTube that contains copyright material the copyright holder has the right to notify YouTube who must then remove the video. If they comply with the takedown notice YouTube would not be liable for copyright damages. A judge granted summary judgement to YouTube as they had complied with all takedown requests in a timely manner. Viacom believes that YouTube needs to do more and wants it to screen all content for copyright infringement before it is allowed to be posted.

Under SOPA/PIPA YouTube and all other user content driven sites, would now be liable for copyright infringement of it’s users and any user that links to that content would also be liable for copyright infringement.

Have you ever posted a link to a YouTube video on your blog, Facebook, Twitter that you didn’t know specifically who owned the copyright and if the content was posted legally?

Take time to educate yourself on these bills and let your representatives know how you feel.

Resources:

• American Censorship – http://americancensorship.org/
• Inforgraphic from American Censorship – http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html
• EFF – http://blacklists.eff.org/
• Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more
• Google – https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/
• Reddit – http://www.reddit.com/