I have waited to blog on this until I was pretty sure the issue had died a horrible death in the U.S. House of Reps and U.S. Senate.  Today was that day.

While I’d like to say “good riddance,” I do know we need to stay vigilant for future bills of this type that might try to make their way through congress, or worse yet, the same bill in a regurgitated form.

Unless you’re completely tech- and Internet-savvy, you may not even know what the impact of these two potential laws might have (and could possibly) been.  Basically, what both bills were doing was giving the Federal government broad powers to shut down or remove websites that were accused of copyright infringement.  What’s that you say?  The Federal government can already do that?

No, they can’t.  They have to have a clear paper trail (or e-trail in this case), show that the website owner is willfully sharing copyrighted materials without permission, given them warning to stop their illegal activities, and THEN shut them down. The new laws (which are effectively dead in congress now) would have given the Federal government the right to shut down a website just because someone said there was copyright infringement.  No proof required, no legal steps need to be taken, no due diligence required in investigation, no due process of law.  Just shut it down, just like that.

You might wonder what lobbyists dreamed up this bill and who such a bill would benefit.  That answer would be the MPAA and the RIAA, the Hollywood entities that control movies and music distribution in our country.  Their intent is to shut down sources of pirated content, and to make it easier to do so.  The problem with this is that such actions throw out the baby with the bathwater.  Are there pirates out there that shouldn’t be doing what they are doing?  Absolutely.  Is it a widespread problem?  That is debatable.  Piracy is bad, I get it and I believe it.  But giving these two self-serving institutions (they are NOT government agencies) the right and the power to control what government does is not the answer.

The real issue for many of the tech-savvy is that giving the government such broad-based power, with such lack of oversight, is a recipe for disaster.  While the bill’s intent, admittedly, is to shut down the biggest and baddest of the piracy websites, its unintended consequence will be to make it easy as a sneeze to shut down any website without cause or due process.  This means that any site hosting videos or music, of any kind, legal or not, would face the very real possibility of being shut down on a whim.

When was “innocent until proven guilty” become abolished in this country?  I thought it was still part of our justice code, but perhaps I’m wrong.

This geek-mom-blogger is happy that SOPA and PIPA have been withdrawn or at least dredged through enough mud that they will not be debated in the near term.  We are safe, for another year.  It’s hard to say what will happen next year, when it is an election year.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2012 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.