A much-feared duo of legislative acts meant to combat piracy, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) in the House, have yielded to massive public criticism and been buried for the time being. The bills, which many considered misguided and unable to effect any real changes, have been abandoned by many of their sponsors. Both bills were introduced with wide bipartisan support, and later dropped with the same support after prominent sites including Google, Wikipedia, Tumblr, and a host of others publicly protested the measures.
The two bills would give new power to government in its effort to quash piracy. Without due process, petitions could be brought before a judge to blacklist a website hosting infringing content. Legal action would then be taken against the site, but not before forcing all who do business with the site to cease doing so (effectively removing their advertising income), removing their entries from search engines, and removing their web address (DNS). All of this combined, would allow authorities to render offending sites invisible on the grounds of a single claim from a citizen.
When SOPA and PIPA were first introduced, many pro-privacy and anti-censorship groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) came out to protest the provisions they contained. The collective actions to stop the bill began soon after: when domain registrar GoDaddy threw their support behind the bill, they were soon matched by a huge boycott organized by the Reddit community. After many influential users began threatening to pull their funding out from under the service, GoDaddy, in less than 24 hours, reversed their decision, and joined many of the others who criticize the bills.
On January 14, 2012, President Obama withdrew his support for SOPA, as well, citing concerns about the DNS-blocking provisions and their effects on web censorship. Many others soon followed, including initial sponsor and Florida Senator Marco Rubio.
Protests were held in many corners of the Internet, from the sites of webcomics to Wikipedia, the sixth-most-visited site on the Web. Even Google, the number-one site in the world, blacked out their logo redaction-style in support of the resistance. On Wikipedia, a huge collection of editors collaboratively decided to black out their site for a full 24 hours in protest, redirecting all traffic to a page with which users can contact their senators and representatives to protest the bills. Sophomore Michelle Zhong admitted, “I don’t know very much about [the bills], that’s for sure. [The blackouts, however, were] very inconvenient! I had to use Wikipedia!” Sophomore Hayden Siegfried felt that “the blackout of [some friends’] favorite website, Tumblr, really gave them an emotional opinion.”
The bills, crafted by some congressmen who even boast about their computer illiteracy, quickly drew the attention of the Internet community. Freshman Diptodip Deb felt that the bills were “bad, of course…written by people that probably don’t use the Internet.” Deb argued that the bills were probably written with good intentions, but “a better law is definitely needed.”
“The problem is,” Deb said, “Piracy will always continue as long as pirates can provide a better service than the legitimate providers. So both new laws and new ways of delivering content [are needed]. Otherwise it’s not possible to effectively stop piracy. Industry needs to innovate in order to satisfy people’s thirst for content.”