Throughout our high school careers at Kaneland, we are required to take classes that inform us how the government is run, and ultimately, we are successful as a country. In each history class, we go over governmental systems that are adapted to other societies.
Let’s take communism, for instance. The idea was developed by Karl Marx, and boy, did it sound good on paper. The idea pushed equality and spread out wealth instead of encouraging social classes. The theory didn’t work out too well, as we can tell from countries that adopted the system. Sometimes, ideas just aren’t as good as they sound.
On Jan. 18, several web sites “blacked out” because of two controversial acts. They are the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act. While the bills are good in theory, they’re starting to sound a lot like communism, at least in the sense that they are repressive and may not work as well as Congress would hope. While SOPA has been dropped, it’s being modified and may be reintroduced. PIPA is still being debated.
U.S. Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) introduced the bills to protect the intellectual property of people artists in the music industry, filmmakers and television. While we don’t want to pay, we have to understand where they’re coming from.
It’s unlikely that the FBI is going to roll into Elburn in Humvees and military tanks to arrest a 12-year-old girl downloading Justin Bieber’s new single, but we can’t blame legislators for the suggestion.
From the government’s standpoint, it makes sense to try to buckle down when it comes to people illegally downloading movies and music, especially when the people illegally downloading the items can make a profit off of it.
A lot of us aren’t aware of what could happen. We aren’t sure of how we’ll be affected, or why these potential laws matter.
But we have to remember that the Internet is something that our generation relies on, and our dependency on it should be the reason we are curious about the bill or why we oppose it. They could censor our internet usage, something that our generation shouldn’t stand for.
These bills are unrealistic for several reasons. The bills encourage user-generated web sites to police every piece of content posted and delete them if they violate copyright laws. While a small company has the ability to read every comment and efficiently obey the law, popular sites such as YouTube could never monitor every comment or video upload. According to YouTube, 48 hours worth of video are uploaded every minute. Another site that has high volumes of traffic is Facebook.
But let’s go back to the 12-year-old girl with Bieber fever. Let’s say she posts a link to his latest video on her grandma’s Facebook wall; it seems like an innocent action. Little does she know, the video violates copyright infringement because whoever posted it isn’t Justin Bieber or his record company.
If the law passes, Facebook would shut down because users are violating copyright laws. No company can afford an entire department devoted to monitoring comments and user-uploaded content. A bill that is more realistic is one that outlines what each web site should have, in order to prevent users from abusing other’s intellectual property. We can enforce a law that requires flagging buttons, which YouTube has.
Clearly, these bills aren’t meant for the fast-paced Internet-based society we live in and frankly, the government should be concerned about more than just what we’re looking at and linking to our friends. Hey Congress, how’s the economy?