The Stop Online Piracy Bill (SOPA) was so broadly written it would have empowered large corporations with the ability to shut down whole websites and have the potential to take the domain hostage just for linking to “pirated” material. Say you made a video from your wedding that had Black Eyed Peas playing in the background– their label could force the website on which the video was uploaded to take the video down and if it so felt like it, take the whole website down, even any website that just linked to that site. That’s insanity. It’s more insane that before a massive online campaign got underway last December– up until the blackout that Wikipedia, Google and a many more big time websites got the word out, two thirds of Congress saw no problem with this. Why? Ignorance and “lobbying.” Who was behind all the lobbying? The entertainment industry, the same industry who for decades has been screwing over recording artists; the same industry that wants you to believe that online piracy hurts their profits, when in fact it broadens their fan base and boosts box office sales.
When I wrote to some of the supporters of SOPA to see why they supported it, they said it was initially about counterfeited goods (Redwing shoes said they were totally unaware of the whole website part of the bill). Now if you look at some of the other supporters of SOPA, a good chunk of them were companies that had goods manufactured overseas and were concerned with counterfeiting. That sounds like an issue that they need to handle with their overseas factories and governments. Maybe they should’ve thought of that before they shipped all that work away from the U.S.?
They say they want to stop counterfeited goods from being sold online; and surely you can’t share manufactured goods online like movies or music. Or can you? You may not be able to share the actual goods, but what about the blue prints and designs? Ever hear of 3D printing? There are multiple Rapid Prototyping Machines available that you can print out damn near anything that can be made of plastic, rubber or is wax-based. These wax items can then also be cast into any other material. If you think about how the photo industry was decimated by the home printer, think about how this could affect manufactured goods. You may be saying to yourself, “yeah but just because we can sew our own clothes doesn’t mean we’ll stop buying new clothes.” This, however, is much easier than sewing clothes, trust me. I reverse-engineered a three-piece suit: sewing is time consuming. But if a consumer has the choice of making something for themselves for the cost of raw polymer plastics and a one-time purchase of a 3D printer versus buying some crap that was made in China, I know what this consumer right here would do. Say also that you’re not using a shared file of a consumer’s design. Suppose you’re using an open source design. That is still going to start affecting major manufacturing profits when it becomes that much easier to make our own things. By the way, food and much more is possible (Google “printed organs, cars and meat.”) This legislation isn’t just in America, right now there is the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Act (pushed hard by the MPAA, the entertainment industry’s ‘lobbying strong arm.’) ACTA is the global version of SOPA that is even stronger and would create a governing body outside the World Trade Organization, The World Intellectual Property Organization and the United Nations. The United States happily signed on to ACTA but the EU is not so keen on it; protests you may not have heard about have stopped it and reversed it in a few countries.
It’s not just about money and commerce, though, it’s about ideas. The Arab Summer was fueled and orchestrated almost entirely by online word of mouth. History lessons and truths of events are being learned by citizens who may have never known of these ideas because of information censorship in their countries. The world is going from round to level in the sense that we are all able to get the same news from around the world if we really want to know it. Think of how quick ideas and news comes to us: before the TV news can even report on a subject, we’re learning of a new twist. Technological advances that will enable us to remove ourselves from the burden of current power and utility needs are right around the corner. Political realities are coming to light ala Wikileaks. Countries and people are waking up to the harsh realities of their oppressions and oppressors. With free exchange of these ideas, this is going to threaten the current power and fiscal structures. We’re going to have to keep the Internet as free and wide open as it is now for these open source ideas to continue, flourish and empower us all into a future that can be more about the global inclusiveness, rather than separatism and becoming a planet of true humanitarian harmony, not greed and hate.
From this point forward we must be diligent on the laws that they will be trying to put in place to destroy the freedom of the Internet, and here’s why and how. This past February, the UN met to start a process to strictly regulate what we know as the free Internet today with a global treaty strongly backed by China and Russia and the other 192 nations of the UN. So what will be the alternative if they turn the Internet into the equivalent of the dribble known as television? I suggest you get to know the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), read your news from sources other than CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC. Google the word Meshnet and nurture your inner nerd.
