Several US based sites went black for a day in protest of proposed anti-piracy legislation that is currently before American lawmakers. I see this issue as being a competition between two ideas.
From what I understand is the proposed law says that you can't publish anything that you don't have intellectual rights to. You can't publish it anywhere. It can't be in the background, it can't be used.
The argument against it is this will limit free speech on the Internet. It will stop a lot of things from being published.
This may be more complicated than it first appears.
For a long time we have held the belief that if you create something then it's yours to do with as you please. If you want to keep it to yourself you can. If you want to outright sell it, you can attempt to do it. If you want to sell the rights to use it, you can try to do that as well. Ultimately the choice is yours.
On the flip side, you can make the argument that if the song or video is simply in the background of a video or audio clip, it's not integral to the clip, it's just like a car rolling down the street. By limiting this, you are limiting how people are able to express themselves.
I'm not going to wade in too deep in this. I don't know which side I feel has a better argument. I know how a lot of people feel the Internet should be this wide open bastion of free exchange. The content isn't necessarily free. It can only be free if the creator permits it to be free and it's really no different than taking a chattel from someone. Maybe the legislation needs to be tweaked. I really don't know since, I also believe it is important to protect free speech and the freedom to express ideas. I'm sure there is a way to keep everyone happy.
If we don't protect the livelihood of those who create content, there will be no new content and that would be a shame as well.
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The problem with the proposed law isn't that it says you can't publish what you don't have rights to. There are already laws about that (from what I understand).
ReplyDeleteThe law essentially would make it all too easy for those in power to censor sites they feel violate property rights (which, since that's not very well defined, could apply to pretty much whatever), without due process. It would also make it illegal not only to publish these 'violations', but also to link to these from other sites.
This censors the internet, is very easy to abuse, and is a burden on 'legitimate' sites. Any site that relies on user generated content would be liable for any link a user posts to an 'infringing' site. For something like, say, Wikipedia, that would mean monitoring every link every user posts (and there are many), and censoring out the 'bad' links. Also, any time another site becomes blacklisted, they would need to scrub all existing content (and there is much) to remove the offending links. Speaking from a strictly technical viewpoint, this cripples the entire internet.
There are plenty of people who support stronger intellectual property laws who are opposed to SOPA and PIPA. There are, perhaps, more rules needed (that's another debate), but this is really not the solution.