Wednesday, January 18, 2012

SOPA: Stop Online Piracy Act HR 3261 Opens Pandora's Box for Federal Intrusion of Internet

By Douglas V. Gibbs

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 gives the federal government the express power to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."  In other words, the federal government has the authority to create patent and copyright programs in order to protect intellectual property.

The people behind the Stop Online Piracy Act are sincere enough, and SOPA is constitutional.  The federal government has the authority to protect copyrights and patents.  However, I do not trust the federal government, so I am torn over SOPA.  They say they only want to establish a system to protect copyright infringement, but in turn can take down websites based on their own bureaucratic criteria.  That is how tyranny begins. . . with the best of intentions.

The bill is described as being designed to "establish a system for taking down websites that the Justice Department determines to be dedicated to copyright infringement.”

Constitutionally, the federal government can pursue this law, yet I don't trust the federal government. If we give them the power to shut down websites due to copyright infringement, how long before they start shutting down sites over their own arbitrary reasons.

I would prefer that copyrights and patents were protected by individual enforcement, but what if it is a big corporation that stole the copyright of a smaller entity? How does the smaller individual entity survive the rigors of court against a huge corporation?

It is a fine line that SOPA dances on. It is necessary, and constitutional, yet opens the door for the federal government to intrude on the last true frontier of free speech.

The problem is that peer to peer sites, and the like, have disregarded copyright laws, and the piracy of copyrighted material has reached an incredible level. The sites are often offshore, or out of country, making it impossible to legally go after them. SOPA will allow the federal government to disallow those sites from being accessible in The States.

Once again, it is necessary, yet a frightening proposition.

It is not a matter of whether or not the federal government "can" pursue legislation like SOPA. . . it is a matter of whether or not they "should."

I am torn. They can, but I fear what the federal government will do once this power is in their hands.

That is where the American People comes in. It is our duty to police them, make sure the federal government does not go farther than the Stop Online Piracy Act allows. We must not be complacent, or else we will get exactly what we deserve.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

SOPA, Freedom, and the Invisible War - Tech Crunch

1 comment:

Tom said...

One of the more heinous provisions of SOPA is that it requires websites to police all of the content on their servers. For example, if you posted a .jpg of something copyrighted (say a still from a movie) on your Facebook profile, the MPAA could sue Facebook because they did not identify that picture and remove it.

There are hundreds of millions of Facebook users, posting many hundreds of millions of items a day. It would essentially end the existence of Facebook.

While it might be a legitimate concern to block access to web sites which provide torrent trackers to copyrighted material, those web sites will merely move their web site and be functioning again in a matter of hours. SOPA will only damage legitimate business.

Further, in order to block the offending web sites, every ISP in the nation would have to black list that web site. This would be a full time job for many people at the ISPs. The only alternative is to force changes onto the top level DNS servers, which exist to translate URLs such as blogspot.com into an IP address. Every other redundant DNS server gets it's list from the top level servers. Therefore, if the US government blocks a web site, it would cascade around the world and block every other internet user from that web site no matter where they live - essentially world wide black lists.

It would also block internet users from using foreign VPNs, which are handy for security reasons. It blocks all intrusion onto your internet traffic and hides your identity. The US government would make that illegal.

The entire thing is poorly thought out and does nothing but harm legitimate usage of the internet.