Internet+Piracy

=Internet Piracy, the SOPA and PIPA Bills, and the Wed, Jan 18th Internet Blackout Protest.=

Here's the link to the National Speak Out Discussion: Online Piracy.

//Remember the internet troubles the first day back from the MLK weekend? This is what it was all about. Here's the background.//

Online piracy and Internet blackout: What exactly happened?

//By John Vettese, Student Voices staff writer//

If you tried to look something up on Wikipedia last Wednesday, you probably noticed something – you couldn’t.

The free online encyclopedia’s U.S. edition participated in a nationwide Internet blackout on Jan. 18 in protest of two bills that Congress was debating – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the Senate. Visitors to the site could not search for information from its front page as they normally did; instead, they were greeted with a black page and appeals to call their elected officials. Other sites, like Google and Archive.org, also “went dark.”

The blackout made enough of a statement that the two bills were withdrawn late last week, postponing a vote until there could be more debate and, in the words of Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, “wider agreement on a solution.”

But what was the problem in the first place?

The bills were proposed to tackle online piracy, specifically on websites where the people who use them control their content. Take Wikipedia, for example. If somebody was editing its entry about Rihanna, and decided to post his or her mp3s from //Talk that Talk// to the page as an example of her new sound, that person is illegally sharing the music – in a way that not only takes away money from the labels and artists who created the music, but also in a way that violates copyright law.

The bills, SOPA and PIPA, argued that not only should the user get in trouble when that happens, but the website itself should also face repercussions. One requirement of SOPA generated a lot of controversy –it would have allowed the government to “blacklist” sites that are used to pirate copyrighted material, even if the sites were designed with legitimate purposes in mind.

To the protesters, this was a disastrous possibility. During the blackout, Wikipedia’s front page posed a request to visitors: “Imagine a world without free knowledge.” It said not only would the laws harm “the free and open Internet,” they also would amount to censorship, and violations of the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

For now, the bills are off the table. But legislators are trying to keep them on the back burner. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in a statement: “There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved.”

**What do you think?**

What do you think of the bills to stop Internet piracy? Should websites be punished for the illegal actions of their users? Or would such restrictions violate the First Amendment? What might a compromise between the anti-piracy side and the anti-censorship side look like? Did you encounter any blacked-out websites? If so, what was your reaction? Join the discussion!