“Stop Online Piracy Act” and the “Protect IP ACT”

Were you on the internet or on social media this week? If you’re anything like me, the answer is a resounding YES. If you’re anything like me, you also probably spent way too much time on social media sites, but that’s a topic for another day.

You probably heard about SOPA and PIPA, and the internet blackout some websites organized in opposition to them this week. If you tried to look up information for a paper on Wikipedia this Tuesday, you were forced to do it the good ol’ fashioned way. How were we able to survive for an entire day without Wikipedia, Reddit and BoingBoing? It was like the apocalypse!

All kidding aside, although we were mildly inconvenienced for a day, SOPA and PIPA are important bills that could have a real impact. Although they were everywhere this week, do you know what they are and what they would do?

This alphabet soup of letters, which sounds more like names of Disney characters, stand for the “Stop Online Piracy Act” and the “Protect IP ACT.” The bills are intended to strengthen protections against internet piracy, copyright infringement and intellectual property theft and are aimed at foreign websites, but advocates say they would lead us down a dangerous road of government censorship of the internet.

There are laws intended to protect copyrighted materials such as music, movies, TV shows, etc., but SOPA / PIPA take it a step further. They target the site hosting the unauthorized content.

The more controversial part of the bill would allow the government to demand that Internet service providers block websites that infringe on copyrighted material.

This would mean that AT&T or AOL would be required to block customers from accessing sites the government believes are unlawfully distributing copyrighted materials.

An estimated 10,000 websites went dark in protest and more than seven million people signed a Google.com petition. It wasn’t just popular websites that got into the act this week and protested. People spoke out against SOPA/PIPA on Facebook and Twitter (especially the trending hashtag #factwithoutwikipedia); maybe you even changed your profile pic to a censor bar in protest. If you did, good for you, you were doing your part to make your voice heard.

Although it was mainly the youth and internet-savvy folk who took part in the online protests, the bills would have wide-ranging effects. Advocates say that if passed they could be used to censor anything the government doesn’t like: political opinions or leaked top secret info (remember the ruckus when wikileaks.com released those confidential reports; if you don’t, go look up Bradley Manning on Wikipedia). Legislation supposedly intended for one purpose, to protect, can often have bad consequences (does the Patriot Act ring a bell?)

For the time being, SOPA/PIPA have been stalled and their votes postponed; but all signs point to them coming back. And when they do, the online community and the youth will agitate once again, our web-surfing habits once more interrupted.

I was personally happy to see so many taking a stand against these bills in the best way they know how, online. I hope that as this controversy inspires more youth, and non-youth, take it a step further. Get out in streets, organize a protest, call your legislator!

Let me know what you think about the blackout and how we as the youth can take it to the next level.

To contact us email us at tribunact@tribunact.com subject line: Youth Perspective.