SOPA – Stop Online Piracy Act

Some people may not have heard of SOPA before. The basic goal of SOPA is to stop piracy on the Internet. To someone who doesn’t know much about copyright laws, SOPA might not seem like a huge problem but it really is. Piracy doesn’t only include streaming a movie off the Internet illegally. If someone makes a YouTube video, it must contain only content created by the person uploading the YouTube video. If a video on the Internet contains copyrighted content, the copyright owner basically has to give permission for the video to be uploaded. At the moment, this isn’t a huge problem because anyone can upload a YouTube video anyway. The goal of SOPA is to allow the American Government to censor websites that infringe copyright laws.

If SOPA passes, it could and probably will damage the Internet greatly. Nearly all websites have a bit of piracy somewhere and nobody really bothers to keep up to date with copyright laws, simply because they are too complicated these days. I have a YouTube video showing Mac users how to fix a problem you can get on a Mac. Towards the beginning of the video, I turn my Mac on and it plays the startup chime. That video is embedded in the tech blog section of my website and that right there, as far as I know, is piracy. And I’m not the only person against SOPA. It is quite obvious that companies such as Mozilla and Wikipedia are against it. Try visiting Wikipedia’s main page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and you’ll see what I mean. Google is against SOPA, aswell as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In fact, there is a whole list from another website opposing SOPA: http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/22/over-40-internet-companies-have-come-out-publicly-against-sopa/ and that list probably hasn’t been updated for a while. As far as I can tell, even companies like Intel, Microsoft, Apple and Adobe are probably against SOPA.

Posted on Wednesday 18th January 2012 - Leave a comment