Zach Amburgey Dr. Sridhar Ramachandran

Dr. Sridhar Ramachandran

Informatics-330

12 June 2012

Censorship Issue on a Worldwide Level

The internet as we know it today is a very new and unique platform. As it stands, it is uncensored. However, the United States government has recently attempted to implement its own form of internet censorship through means of the bills SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Properties Act). This attempt was terminated due to massive uproar all over the internet, in fact on January 18^th, 2012, many websites that people use every day featured rolling blackouts to raise awareness of the bills. Google had a black rectangular box covering the usually bright and colorful letters that spell “Google” on the homepage. Wikipedia officially turned its lights off for the day and refused to provide any query results on its English language portion of the site. Other websites participating in the blackout include Reddit, Mozilla, Tumblr, and WordPress (sopastrike.com). These were just the most commonly used websites; the blackouts were everywhere you turned on the internet on that day. Some statistics from that day are as follows: 10 million total petition signatures from different sites such as avaaz, credo, and moveon, 8 million total attempted calls to senators, 4 million emails pertaining to stopping SOPA/PIPA, 115,000 websites recorded going on strike, and almost 1 billion people got denied service on this day (sopastrike.com/numbers). Since everyone is saying SOPA and PIPA are bad, that means it has to be true…right?

These bills were supposedly designed to stop online piracy. Online piracy refers to downloading/hosting copyrighted material on a website for free access. In the survey connected with this research, 48.1% of participants said they would consider downloading music for free to be a form of stealing, while the other 51.9% would not consider it to be stealing. The fact is, though, that this is indeed a type of theft. One argument from a sophomore named Taylor Abegg-Lawrence was that stealing is stealing, and pirating is copying. He claims that if you steal a car, you now have a car and your victim does not. If you pirate a car, however, you now both have a car (universe.byu.edu). This analogy is flawed, however, because you did not have the permission to copy someone’s car which continues to make it considered stealing, and even if you did have permission, it would then not be considered piracy. The whole point of piracy is that it is stealing an artist’s work without their permission. 3.6% of participants in the study linked with this research claimed to weekly pirate material. 25% Pirate material monthly, however 71.4% said they have never pirated anything before. In addition, according to a study by the Institute for Policy Innovation, the annual harm that online piracy causes to the U.S. economy is $12.5 billion, 70,000 lost jobs, and $2 billion in lost wages (universe.byu.edu).

It is obvious after seeing these numbers that the government would step in and try to solve the online piracy problem. And websites such as Google are not opposed to these bills because they support piracy by any means, but the way in which the bills are written give very unfavorable results to these big websites. A quote from Google’s news team the day before the blackout is as follows: “Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet. So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our US home page (Washingtonpost.com).” This makes it clear that Google is opposed to piracy, however was just unhappy in the way the bills targeted the rogue file sharing websites.

This issue garnered so much attention that even President Obama took a stance on the subject. The white house wrote a letter that criticized certain aspects of these bills; this was obviously not the stance that the entertainment industry was hoping for. A few studio heads were even anonymously reported saying that they would not be offering any more donations to President Obama (pcworld.com). One studio head was reported saying "We just feel very let down by the administration and Obama for not supporting us.” The white house then released a statement concerning these bills saying that anti-piracy legislation should avoid security risks, guard against censorship, and protect innovation (pcworld.com).

In conclusion, it is obvious that these first introductions of SOPA/PIPA were not the proper course of action to regulate piracy, however we have learned quite a bit from their appearance and suppression. It is important to understand this issue will constantly be around as long as the internet is, and will certainly be re-introduced in the future. This is important because we have to take the time to understand what exactly these laws entail, and it will take a more fragile course of action to deal with the intellectual property issue at hand. One issue concerned with the study was that people signed petitions solely because of the hype of the blackout, however this specific survey proved that to be false. This is a good result because it means the people who signed the petition were aware of what they were doing and not simply following the media buzz. It is vital to remember that we are the pioneers of web 2.0, a worldwide platform, and any sort of governing that affects the whole world is going to have to be done very delicately and collaboratively.

Works Cited