On January 18, 2012, many websites - over 500 and counting, many personal, several major sites that internet users access on a daily basis - will stage a strike, voicing their protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), two pieces of legislation which, if passed, give the United States government the power to determine which websites perpetuate acts of online piracy (peer to peer music and movie sharing, posting videos on YouTube copied from television or movies, videos of you singing along with or playing your guitar to a favorite song, etc.) and fine them, censor them or otherwise shut them down.
I asked what people thought this would mean for the writing community as a whole and some said that it shouldn’t affect “us” unless we were using sites such as Tumblr to share works with the public, because sites such as Tumblr will most certainly be affected (shut down?) by the Acts. Others, however, have pointed out that, in their absolute and purest forms, these Acts may not have a broad range affect on writers but the U.S. government has not always been known to hold laws to their absolute and purest forms.
These others also pointed out that where passing legislation is concerned, we should always ask the question, what comes next. Sure, right now, this is (claims to be) an effort to reclaim revenue the entertainment industry is losing each time someone downloads a song, album or movie from a peer to peer sharing site or records an episode of their favorite television program to post on a social networking site.
But what will be picked up from the snowball effect that is sure to follow? If one kind of censorship - selecting which sites the American public should be permitted access to - is allowed, how long will it be before we return to a time when books and other media are banned from public consumption because they contain material that someone, somewhere, deems objectionable. Case in point, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was banned, not for being about governmental censorship of books but for containing one “swear” word. How long will it be before SOPA and PIPA lead our government, and the governments of other “free” nations having taken our lead, to believe they should have control over other aspects of the media?
And that is to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of innocent artists drawing inspiration from “copyrighted” materials. Will you be fined for posting a drawing on your deviantART account that is a direct copy of a professional photographer’s work? Will you be fined if your band covers a well-known (or even completely obscure) song and you post a video of the performance on yourbandswebsite.com? What are the scopes of this legislation and to whose benefit will it, inevitably, become perverted?
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