I honestly don’t fully know the best way to combat online piracy; but I do know that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) isn’t it. The bill would create a plethora of problems if it were passed. Let’s be real here, copyright infringement and piracy are real problems that need real solutions, but when you spot a weed growing in your front yard, do you dig up the entire lawn to get rid of it? No, you pull that weed, and ONLY that weed, out of the ground and you do your best to monitor the lawn for any future weeds.

User-Generated Content Sites and SOPA

One of the complaints that you’ll consistently hear about the SOPA bill is that it is way too generalized and all-encompassing. For instance, under SOPA, a site will be considered dedicated to the theft of U.S. intellectual property if it is “primarily designed or operated for the purpose of offering services in a manner that enables or facilitates copyright infringement”. Well, take YouTube for example; the online video site serves an average of 100 million videos every single day. The majority of it is uploaded by users, who can remain anonymous with minimal effort if they so choose. Under SOPA, YouTube can be considered a site that is primarily designed in a way that enables copyright infringement because of those reasons. Totally nuts. Blog owners might find themselves harboring illegal content through RSS, and pay the price for it; who knows anymore? read more

Less then two full days after some of the world’s top websites began protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the lead sponsor of the bill Lamar Smith, says it will be sent back to the drawing board and redraft with an emphasis on keeping censorship off the table.

Speaking about the decision to keep the bill off the table Smith noted:

“I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy.” He went on to add: “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”

Lamar Smith says he’s still committed to protecting “American intellectual property and innovation” but he stopped short of saying how the bill could be changed to reach that goal.

Under the current form of SOPA critics have argued that the bill would allow company’s to easily shut down sites that disagreed with its opinions, while pushing up the cost of community driven sites such as Wikipedia and Reddit by forcing owners to monitor activity in near real-time.  read more