Should Your Congressman Vote for SOPA?

Politicians and lobbyists have weighted the scales so that copyright law is stacked against consumers and ordinary people. Thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, copyright holders routinely get content hosts like YouTube to take down copyrighted material that is used under valid fair use claims. Even if they know the copyrighted content is being used under fair use, content hosts simply don’t want to risk going to court and they get immunity for removing the allegedly infringing content. This should satisfy copyright holders, but they want more.

The PROTECT IP Act and its even more reactionary House counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), would require search engines to deindex sites that copyright holders say illegally host copyrighted content. DNS registries would also be required to delist those sites, thereby creating a “blacklist” of sites that do not show up on U.S. search results and cannot be registered in the United States. In the House version, putting a site on the blacklist wouldn’t even require a court order; copyright holders would merely need to file a form with the appropriate authorities and they could remove a site that they allege illegally hosts as little as one copyrighted copyrighted video and that site would disappear. Goodbye YouTube.

Arguably worse, SOPA penalizes anybody who illegally streams over 10 pieces of copyrighted music or videos with up to 5 years in prison. Listening to a song on YouTube that was uploaded by somebody who didn’t hold the copyright and didn’t have permission to upload it becomes a felony. Unfortunately, most of the public criticism of SOPA has been exclusively toward censorship, so it might pass without the censorship but with the felony penalties for non-commercial copyright infringement. I wouldn’t be surprised if lobbyists added the blacklist to the bill so that they could trick opponents into voting on SOPA in exchange for removing the blacklist provision. This wouldn’t be the first time Washington lobbyists used a trick like this to get something passed.

A lot of folks feel helpless when fighting copyright holders and their army of lobbyists, but there’s a few things you can do. First and foremost, don’t cast a ballot for any politician who votes for SOPA. In addition, you can vote with your pocketbook: Some companies and individuals are so alarmed by SOPA that they’ve made browser plug-ins to help people fight it. MaxCDN, a site acceleration company, is so outraged that we’ve developed a plug-in that lets you know whether or not the site you’re visiting supports SOPA by checking sites that you visit against a list of known SOPA supporters. The list is updated every 12 hours so that companies have an incentive to quit supporting SOPA. You can use this plug-in to boycott SOPA supporters and help fight SOPA.

SOPA needs to be stopped. It needs to be stopped because it kills innovation. It needs to be stopped because it encourages online companies to go overseas so that they don’t go to prison for accidentally misappropriating copyrighted content. SOPA needs to be stopped because it’s wrong.

This is a guest post by David Henzel, the Vice-President of Marketing at content delivery network MaxCDN. My company’s committed to keeping the Internet free, so we’re encouraging everyone to use our anti-SOPA add-on to stick up for what’s right!