SOPA and PIPA: Gone (for Now)

Last Wednesday, amidst 24-blackouts on websites -- most notably Wikipedia -- two bills in the House and Senate were cast in the limelight: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Both bills sought to make online piracy of creative content something that could actually be punished, so that people in creative industries that depend on intellectual property laws could maybe start making money again.

However, both bills over-reached, and made all forms of hosting pirated content illegal.

Meaning, if someone uploaded a pirated video to YouTube, and you linked to that YouTube video on your blog, and one of your friends posted a link to your blog on Facebook, everyone involved is fucked. Under SOPA and PIPA, that one act could warrant shutting down Facebook, YouTube, and your personal blog. Not to mention that everyone from the original pirate to Mark Zuckerberg could face jailtime. Oh, and if any of these sites appear in Google search results, Google's shutdown too.

Basically, if SOPA and PIPA were too have passed, and were to have been enforced, the entire Internet would be largely inaccessible and hugely censored.

Luckily (for now) both bills have been tabled. The veritable geriatric convention that is Congress took a hint that maybe they didn't understand the Internet when over 7 million people signed a petition against the bills. However, keep an eye out for new iterations of them. SOPA and PIPA have just been tabled -- not rejected.

While shutting down Wikipedia for a day seems to have knocked some sense into Congress, if we want to keep the Internet free and uncensored in the US (which, we do) then we may have to do even more than put up with a whole day where college students can't plagiarize their homework.