Yesterday, many of the most famous hompages organized a “blackout” of their services, enacting a protest against the proposed SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) legislation, being discussed in the USA Senate. Among the many webpages, also the American versions of Google and Wikipedia “auto-blacklisted” themselves.
The two law propositions are proposing to reinforce the blacklisting of pirate websites, to this day still used only in special cases authorized by the US Government, for traditionally “pirated” sport events, such as the SuperbowI.
The bills mentioned above propose three innovations: (A.) the “Anti-Circumvention Provision”, providing the government to go after not only piracy websites, but also websites providing users with methods to by-pass blacklisting measures; (B.) the “Vigilante Provision”, which would grant broad immunity to all service providers if they overblock users or websites voluntarily even without judicial oversight; (C.) last, but not least, the proposal to grant copyright holders powers to obtain an unopposed court order to cut off foreign websites from payment processors and advertisers, thus reinforcing the actual principles of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
The protests against SOPA/PIPA are not directed at encouraging audiovisual piracy but at pointing out that unintended side effects of the relevant provisions could hamper freedom of speech on the net as well as freedom of information. It is natural that when an upcoming bill has a very wide scope which includes very delicate areas of digital copyright the bill should be carefully studied, discussed and revised if necessary to ensure that freedom of speech and information are not overthrown by enforcement of copyright. Copyright owners and those who contribute cultural content on the net are in fact not on opposite sides and they should not be in this effort.
It is therefore in everybody’s interest that the bill receives a more careful evaluation following the objections of the “net” and also considering that the SOPA/PIPA framework is generally fit for the US jurisdiction and will not automatically extend to other contexts.