Many of you will be aware that today, on Wednesday 18th January; many of the largest sites on the web are shutting their doors in protest to a SOPA bill which is being introduced to the U.S government.
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is aimed to prevent the piracy targeted at the entertainment industry. The goal is to take down the websites and users who are making piracy possible on the web. If the bill is passed, this will lead to the roll out of Protect I.P.
Below are a few question and answers regarding Protect I.P
What is the aim of Protect I.P
Protect I.P will stop the operation of large P2P and other sharing websites, where users can download and distribute copyrighted media.
The bill puts emphasis on the websites who are hosting the media, rather than the user who is uploading it.
How will they stop this kind of sharing?
The sharing of the media can be stopped in many different ways, primarily being the blacklisting of a website. The owners can also request that Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) blacklist the websites in question; meaning anyone using the ISP will not be able to access it.
The content owner will also have the ability to sue the website and persons who are deemed to be distributing the media illegally.
The payment gateway the website in question is using can be contacted to terminate the account of the site, cutting off all funding, which will ultimately bring the site down.
Which websites will this effect?
This could affect a huge proportion of websites including the biggest players such as Facebook & YouTube. As explained in a video below, the bill could stop users posting videos and other media, which contained content they have not previously got permission to use. In this case, the website in question would be liable as they are hosting the content.
What is the penalty if caught hosting illegal media?
The minimum penalty you could face in this situation would be that your website is taken down and blocked from ISP’s users.
The maximum penalty, 5 years in jail!
Will this solve online piracy?
Certainly not!
User will still be able to access all of the content that they usually could, but instead of entering the usual domain name, they would need to enter the I.P address of the website. That immediately is a problem and kind of defeats the purpose of the bill?
Also this system leaves huge holes for abuse, meaning the larger more corporate websites can take down the smaller bloggers and websites ran from bedrooms.
The fact is online piracy of media is a much bigger problem, and this bill alone does not even cover half of it.
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
Below are some of the websites protesting today again the bill.
Wikipedia
Flickr
WordPress
This will not be the last we hear from the SOPA bill that is for sure!
