TORONTO – The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has brought a dark cloud over U.S. and Canadian web users alike. So dark, in fact, that Wikipedia’s English-language sites will stage a 24-hour blackout to protest the proposed Internet bill.
Supporters of SOPA and the Protect IP Act (SOPA’s Senate counterpart) say the legislation will protect musicians, filmmakers and writers from having their work stolen and distributed over the Internet.
Web companies paint a different story, fearing penalties including fines for publishing or linking to content that one doesn’t have the rights to use, such as music and movies.
University of Ottawa law professor and Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, Michael Geist, says the legislation could “literally silence” much of the good that comes from popular Internet sites and services, and emphasizes the ramifications that would be felt in Canada.
“There are provisions in the law that would allow U.S. courts to mandate against Canadian sites that ISPs block them in the United States or that search engines remove them from their listings,” says Geist. “And they’d be able to do that without the site even appearing in U.S. court.”
SOPA sponsor House Judiciary Committee Chariman Lamar Smith reportedly issued a statement saying the bill would not censor the Internet, but would protect Americans from foreign thieves who steal their products, technology and intellectual property.
Geist explains that the new law would extend past the border, letting the U.S. government prosecute Canadian websites.
“It actually includes a definition of what a domestic domain name is, and a domestic IP address, under U.S. law and the way their definition is structured is to capture just about everybody in Canada within that basket.”
An additional concern for smaller Internet providers and bloggers is how to defend themselves should content appear on their site that is deemed illegal by the proposed legislation.
Queen’s University media professor Sidneyeve Matrix says the inability to defend themselves against fines augmented by loss of advertising dollars will put a damper Canadian and U.S. technology industries.
“Companies will disappear, companies will go black permanently because they won’t be able to police, and take down links, and block domains as the legislation is requiring them to do,” says Matrix.
While Matrix agrees some kind of limit on such illegal activities these laws are designed to curb is necessary, she says the legislation lacks an understanding of how the web works.
“The backbone of the web is sharing information freely, circulating it between friends and on websites such as Facebook and Twitter,” she says. “If those sites are impacted by SOPA and the Internet privacy law, then we’re going to have amazingly different experience of the web every day.”
The University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information professor Andrew Clement points to the difficulties inherent in enforcing laws on the Internet.
“The whole intellectual property industry has had a hard time policing individual users who they claim are pirates,” says Clement. He suggests the new laws would force people to exercise extreme caution when referring to material or issuing a complaint. Clement uses examples of critiquing an online news source or a plan made by a company.
“The issuing of complaint under this law would be sufficient to complete shutdown of services,” he says. “Even if it’s quite legal what they’re doing, they might fear, legitimately, that they’re going to be punished in some way, either by their provider, or if they’re a provider, by their copyright holder.”
As Wikipedia prepares to “go dark” from 12:00AM ET January 18 to 12:00AM ET January 19, other popular sites are informing users of the law, including Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress and BoingBoing. Even Google’s U.S. home page will highlight the issue with a protest link.
The Wikipedia-led protest aims to make Internet consumers aware of the proposed legislation and urges citizens to contact politicians in the hopes of stopping SOPA from taking effect.
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