National Website ‘Blacklisting’: Stop Online Piracy Act Internet Censorship Bill Introduced and Defeated Before Website Protest

ASTRID TOVAR
Staff Writer

The Internet domineers as the primary source of the public’s free flow of information and a major media center that has been loosely monitored since its early age. Until now.
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was introduced on Oct. 26, 2011 by U.S. House Representative Lamar Smith as a means to stop online piracy.
For a long while the government had no grounds to prosecute offenders of piracy; SOPA is the first of several bills that would have tackled online piracy.
If the bill were to pass, the music industry would receive most of the revenue it has lost in the previous years by finally controlling online piracy.
Its purpose serves to make it harder for websites to sell pirated copyrighted material, such as media and counterfeit goods.
SOPA, as a whole, grants intellectual property owners, such as a movie studios, record labels and corporations, the ability to remove foreign sites against those that have a copyright claim.
If a movie production studio were to claim a certain website was providing streams or torrents of their feature film, they could have Google remove them from their search results, while PayPal, Visa and Mastercard would not accept any monetary transactions for that website.
They are essentially “black listed,” as opponents claim.
Most opponents of the bill agree with its purpose, but when these legal claims of permanently black listing a website can have “no grounds,” the opinions begin to shift.
IP owners can take these actions without a court appearance or judicial sign off, which creates competition complications; any major company website can easily eliminate rising competing companies by claiming copyright infringement.
“The [government] doesn’t have any right to censor the Internet,” senior Chris Trieu said.
Opponents of the bill also criticize that SOPA is a sloppy means to target single criminal activities on a website. if an individual uploads illegal content, the entire website could be shut down.
Websites, as they are now, have firm privacy statements that state they are not responsible for content their users provide. SOPA removes that right.
On Jan. 18, hundreds of websites participated in a nation wide protest against the bills. Websites like Wikipedia shut down access to their site and provided a page of information along with a link for an online petition. Similarly, Google censored its logo. The black bar on the logo also redirected to an online petition which Google reports over 4.5 million people signed.
However, on Jan. 15, representatives concluded the bill was to be pushed to a later date for a decision.