kalikshama
Posts: 14805
Joined: 8/8/2010
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Why did Wikipedia go dark? Because the Stop Online Piracy Act goes way too far
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
...The problem is that the proposed solution goes way too far, completely upsetting the trade-off that currently exists between a little bit of anarchy and a whole lot of incredibly valuable innovative online services. In their haste to tighten the screws, the special interests behind SOPA are handing governments and private actors a club that packs much too powerful a wallop.
Right now, under the terms of the Digital Communications Millennium Act (DCMA), if an IP owner sees something on, let’s say, YouTube or that constitutes a violation, the injured party can send a takedown notice for that item specifically to the operators of the website in question. It’s not an ideal solution, but it’s been in place for about 10 years, and during that period an incredible ecology of Internet services has emerged. There is no question that videos are posted to YouTube every single day — probably every single second — that embody some form of copyright violation, but many would argue that the sum value of what YouTube has to offer society represents a net gain.
Under SOPA, as originally envisioned, a single perceived violation could get an entire website shut down, or just as effectively, choked to death; SOPA includes provisions through which a single allegation of abuse could result in the cessation of payment processing or advertisement delivery to a website. Cut off the finances, and you kill the site.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (which, incidentally, was co-founded by John Gilmore way back in the day) offers a good example of how this could work in theory, as applied to Etsy, the popular online markeplace for handmade goods.
[Etsy] has over 800,000 active “shops”… — far too many for Etsy to monitor manually. Further, because of the eclectic nature of goods listed, it’s difficult to technically filter through the objects listed.
All that means that it’s not feasible for Etsy to proactively prevent listings that may be perceived to violate US copyright or trademark law. That’s a problem, because under SOPA, anybody who is a “holder of an intellectual property right harmed by the activities” of even a portion of the site, could serve Etsy’s payment processors with a notice that would require them to suspend Etsy’s service within 5 days. That means that a trademark violation in one of the storefronts could lead to payment suspension across the entire site.
...No wonder Chris Dodd is so angry. The Internet is treating him like damage, and routing around it.
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RE: SOPA and PIPA info - 
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