SOPA and PIPA – What the heck are they?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the Internet went kind of crazy today. Crazier than usual. On a normal day, crazy means a flame war or two (thousand), a hundred or so cat videos and more content than you can shake a stick at. But today, people and companies across the Internet have tweeted, blogged, posted on Facebook and used every other means to get word out about some controversial legislation under discussion in the U.S. government. The two main targets have been SOPA and PIPA. Here’s a quick rundown on what these are and what they could mean to you if they were passed into law.

Both SOPA and PIPA take aim at Web sites that promote piracy and theft of intellectual property. Specifically, their goal is to hit sites that exist on servers that are outside the jurisdiction of the United States. You see, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) helps companies go after US domestic sites that host pirated content. But how can a government target a site if the computers that store the site itself are in another country? That can get pretty tricky.

Both SOPA and PIPA try to cut off support (and access) to sites hosted on foreign servers. They do this by forcing search engines and payment services from connecting to the foreign sites. Until very recently, SOPA went a step further by including language that would allow the attorney general to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to remove these sites’ domain names from their registries. This, as it turns out, would be a bad thing — it would effectively undermine DNSSEC, a point-to-point security protocol that helps keep Internet traffic safe and encrypted.

After numerous protests, the DNS language in SOPA disappeared. But the opposition to SOPA and PIPA remains in full effect. The Obama administration released a statement last week opposing the language in SOPA, PIPA and another anti-piracy bill called OPEN.

As you might imagine, there are some enormous companies and organizations that would like to see SOPA, PIPA and related bills become law. These companies cite figures that suggest they lose billions of dollars in revenue every year due to piracy. An independent study of the facts finds that it’s much more complex than that — you can’t assume every pirated movie, show, song or whatever represents a lost sale. In fact, the United States Government Accountability Office published a report in 2010 saying that it’s essentially impossible to come up with an accurate figure representing losses. It could be that the various entertainment industries are exaggerating (or simply overestimating) the amount of money lost due to piracy. The bottom line is that piracy may not be that big of a problem in the first place, which would make this proposed legislation at best an overreaction and at worst unnecessary. It’s like using a bomb to remove an anthill.

That’s the basic foundation for SOPA and PIPA. Let’s look at what these pieces of legislation could do:

• They could force search engines, payment services and advertising services to cut off access/support to sites without any due process. There’d be no trial and no strikes — one complaint would be enough to cut off support.
• If the targeted site proves that it was unfairly punished under these pieces of legislation there’d be no way for the site to pursue damages against anyone. You see, SOPA protects all parties acting under SOPA from lawsuits.
• Sites like WikiLeaks and other whistleblower organizations could be targeted by numerous parties and effectively silenced (or at least cut off from financial support).
• Search engines, payment services and advertising agencies would have to do a lot of work to keep up with the demands of SOPA and PIPA even though these companies aren’t responsible for the content that appears on other Web sites.

Here’s what they wouldn’t do:

• They wouldn’t stop people from accessing piracy sites. Enterprising developers have already created extensions in Firefox, Chrome and other browsers that would allow users to get around DNS blocking. And, since the wording about DNS blocking is now gone from SOPA, access isn’t really a problem anymore.
• Not all piracy sites generate revenue. Cutting off financial support from the US might come as a blow to some sites but others will continue as if nothing has happened. In other words, the anti-piracy legislation won’t actually stop piracy.
• They don’t target users who are accessing sites. These pieces of legislation are targeting the sites themselves, not the folks who visit to access pirated content.
• They don’t target domestic sites. This part is tricky — many companies have Web sites that include foreign URLs. Some may host part of or the entirety of their Web presence on servers outside the United States. It’s possible for an American company to feel the effects of SOPA or PIPA directly. But the real focus is on foreign piracy sites.

And here’s what’s vague:

• They target sites that are “US-directed.” In general, this means a site that is easy for someone within the US to access and navigate. But with tools like Google Translate, even a site written in another language is navigable by an average Internet user. In my mind, this definition is largely without meaning.
• They target sites that primarily exist to distribute pirated material. How do we determine if a site is primarily about piracy? If there’s a Web site that has hundreds of pages under its domain and only a few have anything to do with piracy or unauthorized use of intellectual property, is it fair game under SOPA or PIPA? Could the entire site be cut off from financial support as a result?
• What could the registrant of the site do to prove innocence or get decisions overturned? And what happens afterward?