As the Senate prepares to vote on PIPA, how will we ensure the bill doesn’t pass?

Lee Bell
January 13, 2012
4 Comments
Internet Dead

The future of the internet if wicked PIPA gets hold of it

In less than a fortnight, on 24 January, the Senate is expected to meet to vote on a bill for the first ever US internet censorship system: PIPA – the Protect IP Act.

First introduced in May last year by Senators Patrick Leahy, Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley, PIPA is a re-written legislation of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act of 2010 which failed to pass.

If passed this time, though, PIPA will give US corporations and the government the right to seek legal action with any website that it deems as enabling copyright infringement – no matter where in the world the site is based. It could also: force ISPs to block access to certain websites; have the power to seek legal action against search engines; and give companies the authority to sue new sites they feel aren’t doing a enough to prevent infringement. It’s a pretty perilous piece of law that could truly damage technological innovation and thus our modern world of entertainment –our entire online experience.

What’s worse, if PIPA is passed it will work in cooperation with the pending SOPA – the Stop Online Piracy Act introduced to the US House of Representatives by Rep. Lamar Smith in October last year – which will seize domains companies claim are infringing on their copyrights. If both these bills become law, together they could make a somewhat dangerous double act and would, in essence, kill the internet as we know it.

But this isn’t the first time US Government has tried to forbid technology at the command of corporate lobbyists. io9.com compiled a quite humorous and in hindsight a ludicrous list illustrating plenty of other technologies that the US Government has been pushed to outlaw by conglomerates and failed.

VCRs were one of them, which saw the introduction of six bills in Congress after various movie studios complained of their threat.

Another is phonographs, when John Philip Sousa, who wrote “Stars and Stripes Forever”, testified before Congress that the gramophone and the player piano would put musicians out of business. Thank god that wasn’t passed. Where would Spotify be now if it had?

Similarly, MP3 players have also had their day in the Senate spotlight, seeing both the Induce Act and the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, which sought to ban any technology that induces people to violate copyright. These bills still haven’t been passed, but could well be one day. Let’s hope they stay locked in the filing cabinet for as long as possible.

However, Congress hasn’t always failed in passing bills intended to stifle and censor the internet. The first and closest to home of course, is online gambling – when the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 was passed barring American banks and credit card companies from processing payments to gambling sites.

Another piece of equipment that never saw consumer sunlight due to corporate lobbying is DAT (Digital Audio Tape) recorders. After music industry leaders demanded that they should be fitted with technology to degrade sound quality – the piece of kit never came to being, and failed once put under the control of the content industry.

It’s becoming more obvious just how much power big corporations have over the US Government and the companies with that power are using it to pass bills to save a few bucks at the expense of personal freedoms.

At the moment, there’s plenty of protesting going on. A few internet giants has stepped up their support in order to stop the ridiculous PIPA and SOPA bills. Two of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley, Facebook and Google, have been very vocal in their opposition of the bills.

Unfortunately, not all of Silicon Valley’s finest are putting up such a fight. The majority of tech firms such as Adobe, Apple, Corel, Intel, Dell, Microsoft and 23 other big names, were once in support of the bill and are now members of the Business Software Alliance – a “non-profit trade association created to advance the goals of the software industry”. Essentially, big ass tech firms care more about the money they lose through piracy, which is understandable. But not only will PIPA and SOPA help fight piracy crime, together they will impede technological advance and innovation.

If these acts were around back when the internet was started, none of the sites we use today, most of us on a daily basis, would have come to fruition. Facebook, YouTube, MediaFire, SoundCloud, Twitter, DropBox – or any other site that can be targeted as a place where online piracy could take place – would have never been allowed to.

Luckily, social media site Reddit announced today that it will go on strike for 12 hours on 18 January to protest against the bills, with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales saying he hopes to do the same. Google and Facebook have talked about joining them but have yet to go public with their plans.

So what can we do to put a stop to the passing of PIPA and SOPA? Well, for starters you could sign the pledge to boycott server and domain registrar GoDaddy. The “nodaddy” petition kicked off on Readit after angry internet users read that the company had decided to back the SOPA bill. Many of GoDaddy’s customers have already abandoned the site in their repugnance that it would do such a thing. Even Wikipedia said it would move its domains away from GoDaddy, so why shouldn’t we join in and do all we can to ensure similar sites, as well as other SOPA backers, don’t have customer approval.

You could also inform your state Senators and Congressmen of your disgust. Call them. Let them know you’re not happy. In fact, inform everyone you know to do the same, and sign as many online petitions as possible. Getting your voice heard is the only way we can but a stop to these bills and save the internet.

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Tags: ACT, Article, copy right infringment, Facebook, Google, PIPA, SOPA
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