For 24 hours, Wikipedia has been blacked out
For over a decade, Wikipedia have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Can there be anyone on the planet who has not turned to it for advice? What modern young student could manage without it? It is truly one of the single biggest triumphs of the Web. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet and as a result Wikipedia have temporarily shut down.
Wikipedia is protesting against SOPA and PIPA two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively.
SOPA is short for the "Stop Online Piracy Act," and PIPA is an acronym for the "Protect IP Act." ("IP" stands for "intellectual property.") In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, not unreasonable one might think. But the end result of these bills maybe to actually infringe free expression and harm the Internet.
The real problem is SOPA and PIPA are badly drafted pieces of legislation that won't be effective in their main goal (to stop copyright infringement), and will cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. And, SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.
One wonders are these bills a Trojan horse for something far more sinister? The internet has constantly highlighted the duplicity and incompetence of governments and politicians of all nations. Clearly there are those who are very anxious to limit the internet and turn the clock back thirty years. What better way to do this to move in under the eminently plausible excuse of stopping piracy.
No sane person condones piracy and yet as someone who lives in Europe I wonder how much piracy would exist in Europe if we here were able to buy products such as films and music at the same price they do in the USA where prices are often half what they are here.
People have calculated that if you were building up your music collection from scratch it would be cheaper to fly to New York, buy your music and fly back home and still save a considerable amount of money.
Did anyone throw their hand up in horror when the same people encoded CD/DVD players so they couldn’t play DVDs purchased in America? Clearly some people don’t believe in a free market.
It behooves us all to think about what is happening here. Too many times the implausible has ridden in on the coat-tails of the plausible. I can’t help thinking something is rotten in the State of Denmark.
3 comments:
Well said. If anyone trusts governments of any hue they are simply deluded. Their loathing of the internet and its subversive opportunities drive them mad.
People should, of course, respect copyright but that is not what this is about, no matter what they say
It won't pass , they receive too much support from those greatly effected. I suspect it will disappear. For now anyway.
I agree this has little to do with copyright.
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