The following is dedicated to former Vanity Fair contributing editor, Christopher Hitchens. It can be argued that SOPA would not have even been considered, were proponents of free Speech such as Hitchens, alive to combat it.
In Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu’s Who Controls The Internet: Illusions of a Borderless World, the internet is at first presented as an open community in which the laws are governed by the people living there. John Perry Barlow, a political activist described the web as separate legal ground. For people like him the web was libertarianism written in ColdFusion, Java, and HTML. Henry Rollins, a musician, writer and actor continues this train of thought, anticipating the potential of freedom of speech in cyberspace, calling the web
“The one place you can go and tell your version of the truth, rail against liars, fakes and propagandists with your own unique propaganda, sign your name to it and let the world know how you feel”
The recent use of the internet to organize protests and plan demonstrations during the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt comes to mind. But it does pay to remember that for a while at least, the government of Egypt blocked the country off from the internet. The ominous use of the word Illusions becomes clear to the reader by the end of the aforementioned book.
SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was introduced on October 26th 2011 into the United States House of Representatives by Lamar Smith. With the intention of limiting the problem faced by the Motion Picture Association, record companies, and others, with online theft of content known as piracy, opponents say the bill goes too far, and gives the government too much power. Those in favor of the bill state that piracy is hurting the economy, costing the entertainment industry billions each year.
SOPA would allow the federal government to use DNS filtering to block what Hollywood lobbyists are calling “Rogue Sites”. A term defined in the bill as a foreign website offering movies, music, software, and other pirated materials or sites that allow access to such websites. DNS filtering would un-list these “rogue sites” as well as allowing lawsuits to search engine providers and websites hosting links to such sites.
Proponents of free speech have argued that giving the government the power to blacklists websites is a threat to free speech. Censorship concerns were voiced over the bill whose proposed goals include job and economic growth. Good intentions have led the legislative branch where good intentions often do as SOPA threatens to have an inverse effect on American Jobs. In a letter to high ranking members of the House and the Senate, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn wrote that SOPA is “a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and
