The movie industry and government are and always will be
fighting piracy till currency is abolished but the question is when is
protecting copyright going to far.
That is the
question with two bills going through the senate and the house in the United
States. These two bills are the PIPA (Protect IP Act) and SOPA (Stop Online
Piracy Act). But what makes these two bills so atrocious, in short really loose
wording and horrible clauses put in both bills that will enable someone to shut
down a site just for having copyrighted content on it weather its used in
accordance to fair use or not. This isn’t just the content they can take down
which under current law is possible on most of the internet but the whole site
can be taken down due to one infraction. With user created content sites like
Youtube out there and Google (Since it covers links to copyrighted content as
well) could be completely shut down.
This is
absolutely ludicrous not only is it going to hurt the whole internet and
infringe on the freedom of speech that we Americans hold so dear and we thought
our government did as well, I believe it could hurt the Film industry as well.
First of all if a popular site is taken down by this act and it comes out that
it was due to a studio’s movie being on the site people would quickly accuse
the studio of causing the site blockage even though it could just be a
government official proving that the bill can be used to stop piracy. This is
lunacy in its own but also you have to look even though piracy does take money
from studios and I do not condone it in the least, I do understand it does
happen and I also know that pirates tend to drive business to the studio as
well with many only pirating to see if they want a movie to only go buy it
later and also some pirates talking to other people willing to pay about the
movie in great word of mouth advertising that you wouldn’t get if you enacted
something like this. This is all to say that people don’t already blame film
companies for pushing the legislation in the first place.
So if you
think this is as big an outrage as me join the like of Reddit and Google in
their protesting of this bill on this day.
