Better known as the "Internet Censorship Bill," SOPA is part of a two-pronged attack on free speech in the US (the other side being the National Defense Authorization Act, which effecively allows the police to to patrol the streets para-military martial law style. Good article (from a conservative source) here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/12/05/the-national-defense-authorization-act-is-the-greatest-threat-to-civil-liberties-americans-face/).
Since the bill is a little dense, here's what SOPA really does. First, it makes websites that post content from users (Youtube, our beloved and strikingly handsome Facebook, right down to stuff like Deviant Art, Livejournal and whatever other assorted slime molds one can scrape from the bottom of a barrel) and makes the hosting website directly responsible for it. Now, Youtube, for example, doesn't allow posting copyrighted material, but they also don't claim to be responsible for what people do with it. The website, like Facebook et al, presents itself more as a tool with which the user can do what he or she wants. There's some basic guidelines (nudity, violence, etc.), but those are the same as a hammer coming with the suggestion that you don't stick it in a wall socket. This freedom of use is what makes these websites so popular, dynamic, wealthy (Google, which owns Youtube, has one of the most valuable stocks in the country), and in a way, important. There is the basic guiding principal that one can say what one wants on teh Interwebz.
SOPA changes this by establishing a set of purposely vague content guidelines, but that is not the most insidious part. What really makes this law dangerous is how these guidelines are enforced. In summary, it allows the justice department to press charges against a hosting service for certain content, whether it is deemed in violation of copyright law, illegal or offensive. So a basic example would be that if you upload a video backed with Born This Way, Youtube must remove the copyrighted content or be faced with legal action. Now thing of how many videos backed with Born This Way are on Youtube right now. Like, woah.
Now as crappy as that it is, it does sort of make sense. It's a copyrighted song after all, and thirteen year olds everywhere who think they're being clever with Windows Movie Maker need to be taught that the law is the law. Here's where it gets interesting. Let's look at the video of the police officer pepper spraying sitting students at UC Davis. Don't you think that's offensive to the university? Aren't shots of the Davis campus copyrighted material? Doesn't the same apply to the video of the officer pepper spraying four unarmed women in New York? Or videos of [insert headline politican here] blatantly contradicting themselves on national television just a few years ago?
SOPA puts a stop to all of that too.
It is an attack of free speech and the freedom of the internet, which allows the average person to present these important and, frankly, world-changing events. SOPA will make it far more difficult. If not impssible.
But that isn't the purpose of this essay. All of these things aside, how do you get the John and Jane Everyman's of the world to rally against it? I'm sure lots of people say, "But I don't care about OWS or Laday Gaga or politics. I'm an upstanding citizen and don't download things illegaly, so how does this affect me?"
Answer: Porn.
Specifically, SOPA would also mean the end of free pornography on the internet. Just take a minute and absorb that. It's ok - I'll wait.
...
Like anything else, porn does not come from the goodness of one's heart as a salve for the lonely and maladjusted. People get rich off of it. To paraphase Spaceballs, "They're not just doing it for money; they're doing it for a shitload of money!" Porn is a multi-billion dollar business, if not more, and don't doubt for a second that they are frontline warriors on the battefield of copyright law.
Think about it. If SOPA passes, every producer from the Larry Flints and Hugh Hephners of the world, right down to every sweaty crack-addled scumbag posting "Make $2,500 a month from home!" signs around Paterson, New Jersey, will jump on the chance to take the legal gatling gun to the no doubt thousands, tens of thousands or more likely hundreds of thousands of websites that traffick porn at not cost to you. You know those tales of yore we all heard in grade school about how, once, in some mythic past before industry, fishermen wouldn't even need to cast lines or nets because the rivers and streams were so packed with fish, they'd just set to sail and let them jump on the boat? Just imagine the boat is your computer and the fish are naked ladies. This is where we are, and the evil, post-apocolypic and smog-choked future where the only fish left alive are swimming in fishtanks controlled by wealthy industry tycoons is the terrifyingly close future. Except now the fish tanks are computers and the fish are still naked ladies.
I don't want to say the following but I feel need to (this is the Intenet after all). I'm not trying to be cute, and I'm not trying to an advocate for porn in some way. But again, think about it. Porn is one of the top three uses of the internet, right up there with Facebook, checking your bank account and Googling yourself. And like it or not, it's a massive and powerful indsutry, and massive and powerful industries really only seek to become more massive and more powerful. And like it or not, people love their porn. Shows like True Blood or The Tudors are basically costume porn with writers (you didn't think a show about vampires doin' it got popular because of the plots, did you?) I didn't have a computer with internet capabilities until I was 16 and already had firsthand experience playing the what-goes-where game, but now that every budding pre-teen is online, porn takes a bigger role in sex education than sex education. Sure, we don't talkabout it in polite soceity; saying it isn't going to win you any friends, but really. Come on.
Anyway, that's my political stratgey for getting the public behind voting down SOPA. Change "The attack on free speech" to "The attack on free porn," and I promise you, late at night, when nobody's looking, people will sign that shit right quick.
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