Beginning of the end

Manila Standard Today, Lifestyle | January 25, 2012

The Internet is an incredibly wondrous thing. It’s probably the most game-changing technology in modern history. But it’s not without its dark side. One of its deadliest aspects is that it enables copyright infringement. The Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA) of the United States House of Representatives, together with its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), aims to address that flaw by a more aggressive way of protecting intellectual property. But it’s not that easy. Here’s The Gist:

SOPA and PIPA have been shelved after US President Barack Obama said that he was opposed to them and after Internet heavyweights, including Wikipedia and Reddit, staged online protests. Countless of Americans expressed their disagreement to the legislation, flooding their respective congressmen with calls and mail. But why are so many people against it?

In a nutshell, the bills, if passed and enacted, will give copyright holders and US law enforcement the opportunity to seek court orders barring advertising networks and payment facilities from doing business with any Web site that’s found guilty of copyright infringement. They can also ask for the removal of links from search engines and require Internet service providers to block access to the sites.

The long and short of it is that popular sites like Wikipedia and YouTube will virtually cease to exist because they carry content whose copyrights obviously belong to others. That affects the entire online population, not just those in the United States. That means no more downloading from torrents, no more streaming and potentially no more blogging. The Internet will most definitely collapse.

The good news for netizens is that SOPA and PIPA are dead in the water. But it doesn’t mean that the Internet will remain an anarchy as a more streamlined version of the bill, called the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act has just been proposed.

And as if fanning the fire, the US federal government recently shut down the US server of file-hosting site Megaupload, where they have jurisdiction, and arrested the company’s key officials. As a response, the Anonymous network of hacktivists (people who hack to demonstrate their activism) flooded the servers of the US Justice Department, the US Copyright Office, Universal Music Group, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, causing their Web sites to crash.

Published peports indicate that the Web sites of TV network CBS, the French Media Company, Vivendi and Brazil’s Tangara De Serra, among other targets, have also been compromised. Nope, it’s definitely not anarchy; it’s war.