ssummar@mavs.coloradomesa.edu

For students with last-minute research papers or burning questions about anything from Bono to the Roman Catholic Diocese, Wikipedia’s blackout last week came as something of a slap in the face. The blackout, a protest coordinated with similar action on other major sites, caused waves online and brought attention to proposed legislation in Congress. Supporters and detractors of the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA), including CMU students, engaged in dialogue that spurred congressional action.

“SOPA and PIPA were designed to give the U.S. authority to shut down websites, which are accused of providing access to intellectual property without permission of authors and publishers,” Mass Communication instructor Adam Cochran said.

In the past, American media companies have fought piracy by asking the government to shut down U.S.-based sites that facilitate infringement, seeking assistance from Internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast in blocking subscribers, and by suing individuals. These tactics are ineffective for overseas sites like The Pirate Bay and MegaUpload.

SOPA and PIPA, introduced in October and May, respectively, initially contained provisions allowing ISPs to prevent customers from accessing sites with histories of copyright infringement. This was met with enough resistance from industry security experts that the provision was dropped from both bills. The bills also allowed media companies to seek court orders prohibiting advertisers and search engines to do business with the sites, removing funding and traffic.

Proponents of the legislation believe it will protect jobs in media industries and provide a stronger enforcement tool for copyright infringement. Detractors believe the bill has the power shut down large domains when the fault lies with a single web page, and that it will endanger First Amendment rights by censoring information online.

While the bills received support from members of the entertainment industry and even cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies like Revlon and Pfizer, which have a vested interest in preventing the sale of other counterfeit products, the overall reaction in the tech sector was negative. Many felt the proposed legislation was too vague, especially when it came to sites with user-generated content, which would have to police users’ behavior. Monitoring already happens on large sites like YouTube, but it could make things difficult for start-up sites.

“Piracy and IP protection are serious issues,” Cochran said. “I think that radicals are the only ones who argue that piracy should not be punished. On the other hand, the music and movie industries error by defining every act of distribution of copyrighted material as a lost sale. In some cases, there is a thin line between piracy and promotion.”

Some of the most salient considerations in the SOPA/PIPA dialogue came from a surprising source.

“I think Justin Bieber actually had some good points on this topic in his arguments against SOPA,” Cochran said. “Bieber became famous by singing covers of copyrighted music. He did not get permission from the artists and he posted the videos to YouTube. Under SOPA, this would have potentially been a criminal act that could have allowed the government to punish Bieber, YouTube and Google.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights advocacy group, confirmed that the protest was the largest in Internet history, with over 115,000 sites altering their pages in some way. Locally, many students adjusted their Facebook and Twitter profile pictures to reflect their opposition to the bills. On January 20, SOPA’s author, Representative Lamar Smith, announced his plans to postpone drafting the bill until “wider agreement could be reached.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid postponed PIPA on January 18 for similar reasons.

The same day SOPA failed, MegaUpload’s founder Kim Dotcom was arrested for copyright infringement in his New Zealand mansion after retreating with a gun to a safe room. According to the FBI, Dotcom made $42 million from infringing copyrighted material in 2010 alone and is now being prosecuted in one of the largest copyright cases in history.

“SOPA and PIPA failed because they were very poor ideas,” Cochran said. “It should be noted that on the exact day that Congress officially killed both acts, one of the largest sources of pirated content was shut down by the Justice Department. Hopefully both citizens and Congress will ask why they need SOPA-like legislation, if the U.S. already has this power.”