Internet censorship isn’t just a problem in China anymore.
The United States government is attempting to evolve its control over internet communications with a new bill: The Stop Online Piracy Act (aka E-Parasites Act). Sites accused of infringing copyright will be blocked by internet service providers in the U.S.
A site can be blocked without prior notice and without a trial if deemed “infringing” by the government or an internet service provider. That’s right: Comcast or Quest could be banning you from website access in the future. An accusation could be enough to ban an entire website from United States access.
“It is quite a scary scenario,” said Kyu Ho Youm, University Law School professor and Jonathan Marshall First Amendment Chair.@@http://www.law.uoregon.edu/faculty/youm/@@ “Instead of trying to strike the right balance, they just try to restrict too much. It is rather un-American.”
Critics argue that the use of copyrighted material is often not illegal under fair use laws and that E-Parasites is too overarching. Websites could be blocked without warning and without known cause.
“How do you know what is illegal versus what is not illegal?” Youm said. “Just because you are using someone’s copyrighted material doesn’t mean you are violating the law until it is found to be violating the law by — not the government, not the copyright holder — the mutual, impartial independent securities.”
Indeed, the lack of due process is reason enough for concern. In addition, this bill would severely undermine the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, a bill that fights copyright infringement online while still protecting host sites like Youtube and Twitter from their users’ illegal activities. E-Parasites would make these sites responsible for the content of their users, promoting self-restriction and further censorship on some of the United States’ most popular websites.
Youm attributes some of the enthusiasm behind this new bill to the success of the U.S.’s restrictions on Wikileaks.
When companies like Paypal and Visa disallowed their users to donate to Wikileaks, many accused the companies of violating free speech laws. These accusations changed little, however, and Wikileaks is now announcing its impending bankruptcy.@@http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/10701973-wikileaks-bankruptcy-by-the-economic@@
“It’s an indirect way to regulate foreign companies,” Youm said. E-Parasites is mostly aimed at foreign sites outside of U.S. law, such as the file-sharing hub ThePirateBay based in Sweden. Lawsuits by major media companies in the U.S. against these foreign entities are often useless, and E-Parasites is a means of putting up a firewall on those companies before they appear in the U.S. through a citizen’s monitor.
“It is definitely affecting the access to information and the right to use some otherwise publicly available material,” Youm said. “It’s more first amendment-restrictive than necessary. It is an overblown approach. The ramifications are quite difficult to predict.”
The fact is this bill is not about the moral ramifications of stealing digital products. It is about money and hidden regulations restricting American rights in the name of business and foreign competition. It is urging censorship in roundabout ways while claiming to be better protecting copyrighted material and media-industry jobs.
But no amount of censorship is acceptable, and the supposed goals of this bill do not justify such a blatant disregard of the first amendment. The United States should not be associated with web pages reading, “We’re sorry; the content on this website is not available in your country.” It is a huge and unnecessary step toward a negative outcome, one of information filtering and government- and corporate-regulated knowledge.
“The United States should be a lot more careful with doing too much,” Youm said. “Sometimes, little by little is the better way, especially when we’re talking about a fast-changing technological involvement in the global century. The technological framework is still evolving. This kind of thing is difficult to predict.”
Evolving technologies and the U.S. Constitution are both reasons to take the fight against copyright infringement slowly and one step at a time. Sites that provide popular services, like Youtube and Facebook, should not be punished for user-generated data, and internet providers should never have the power to regulate what sites a user can visit.