If you follow me on Twitter, or if you follow NoWhiteNoise on Twitter, or even if you’ve read one of my Gossip Girl recaps — you know I’m not a supporter of the Stop Online Privacy Act, better known as SOPA. What you may not know is why I’ve been shamelessly shoving it down your throats, why I’m not supporting it, or even what it would mean to you as a regular television viewer (and more so, as a reader of this very fine blog if I do say so myself).
Full disclosure: before I began NWN, I was running a Microsoft blog and writing for Neowin, which is to say that I’m always tapped in to more tech matters. But this isn’t just an issue for techies to worry about — it’s something you should be paying attention to as well. And in this post I hope to explain to you exactly why I’ve been using NWN as an avenue to talk about it.
SOPA, the PROTECT IP Act, and the Online Protection and Digital Enforcement Act (also known as OPEN) are bills the United States government is trying to pass that are masked to do one thing: protect copyright holders from potential copyright infringement. The way this would happen is like this: a copyright holder would complain that a site is potentially infringing their copyright and the consequences for that are multifold. (1) The site can have its source of income removed or in other words their advertisements. (2) The site can be forbidden from using credit card transaction methods, or in other words ecommerce or third parties like PayPal will be forbidden from interacting with the site’s owners. (3) The site can be blocked from search engine results, or in other words won’t show up on Google. (4) Its domain name can be stripped away, or in other words you won’t be able to access this site by typing “nowhitenoise.com” in your address bar.
Most of these actions would only be taken out on foreign sites with US audiences. Repercussions to US-based sites are mostly economical.
Here’s a concrete example of what could happen. Thankfully, NWN is a small blog so Warner Bros. doesn’t know about us, but if you search, there’s a post with the Gossip Girl 100th episode video that Chace Crawford leaked on Twitter. That video has been taken off YouTube and big TV sites. Now, if SOPA was enacted, instead of contacting the site’s runners to take down just the sole video, Warner Bros. (or whoever’s claiming copyright) could circumvent the owner altogether and shut down the entire website.
Apart from the means of income methods outlined above (which are truly impactful), I want to focus on the fourth: stripping away domain names. Now, this isn’t exactly damaging — and once again, this is only a consequence to foreign sites. Websites don’t need full domain names to stay on the Internet. Every website has an IP address that when typed into your address bar can take you to it, the problem is that everyday users know nothing about that. Even then: growing awareness of that IP address (for smaller sites) would be moot.
Take the extended metaphor this “SOPA for Dummies” Google doc makes: type 74.125.159.99 into your address bar. You’ll find that you’re taken to Google.com. See? Domain names (DNS, et al) are like street signs and addresses and IPs are like… coordinates. You can change street signs all you want but if you know the coordinates, the people who are savvy enough will find it — and those who aren’t will just be lost. (Though that part of the bill will supposedly be removed.)
Ever miss that episode of your favorite show and (since it’s already hard as hell to find it online) you caught it on YouTube? Or perhaps you downloaded it directly… or as a torrent? You won’t be able to do so anymore. Those are very selfish reasons and hard to argue against, but here’s something simple and recreational:
What about those shipping videos you love watching? There’s no denying that no one supplements watching an entire television show just to watch shipping videos. You’ve never said “Instead of watching tonight’s Vampire Diaries, I’m just going to see a three minute video set to an Adele song that features Elena and Damon from various episodes cleverly edited together.” Except that you potentially won’t be able to enjoy them because copyright holders could claim copyright on those videos (since it uses their material) and music copyright holders could too.
And maybe you can live without shipping videos, but what about all of YouTube? Under these legislations sites like YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and any user-generated site will most likely cease to exist since they are responsible for what their users upload. To reiterate: currently, if a video violates copyright, the holder makes a claim to YouTube and that sole video is taken down. If these pieces of legislation pass, YouTube (and any other site that fits the example) can be taken down because they won’t be allowed to receive any income.
Now if an ad service or a payment provider like PayPal does not cease to do business with you, they can come after you. So if you’re the one who made that shipper video… time to lawyer up!
So the bill(s) would only affect user-generated content, right? Everything is user-generated. We have about 10 users on staff generating content currently!
This we’ve learned: all copyright holders have to do is claim a site is violating copyright laws and actions will be taken against that site.
What’s the most popular aspect of NoWhiteNoise? Photo recaps. What are photo recaps? Screencaps of television show episodes. It’s not exactly hard to do the math here: potential copyright infringement is happening in the eyes of Hollywood.
I believe that, already, the blog has been held back because of what I write on those caps (I apologize). But I would be surprised if anyone doesn’t watch an episode of a show and instead reads my photo recaps exclusively. More so I personally believe, apart from being supplementary material, they’re another form of entertainment altogether.
But the repercussions are unknown. And that’s terrifying. I know, I know that we’re just a little blog, so who cares about us right?
Well last month, Universal removed an episode a tech talk show titled “Tech News Today” from YouTube because it contained copyrighted clips. During the same time, the same company, unlawfully was able to remove a song from YouTube by artists who performed it in favor of Megaupload (a site that would be affected by SOPA) by claiming they held copyright to it. That was false; they did not own the song in any way, shape, or form. Perhaps the artists who performed and were in the song/video are contracted by Universal, but they don’t own it.
And the bill hasn’t even passed yet.
There are other arguments here (it won’t stop piracy, there are better and effective ways to counter piracy in the first place, and so on) and there are many ways these bills can affect you. But you’ve probably read enough.
What can you do? It’s simple: contact your local congressperson. Just use the EFF’s form (all you need is your zip code) to find your local congressperson and send them an email automatically. Phone calls work too.
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Really good article Michael! Only thing is you should include NWNs IP so people can still find you if SOPA passes! :D