What Would a Post-SOPA Internet Look Like?
Nona Willis Aronowitz for GOOD magazine. Read up before it’s too late, friends.
What would a post-SOPA internet look like? Here’s a glimpse of a dystopian future.
- Let’s start with the personal: Your Tumblr, Twitter feed, or Facebook page could be “executed” at any time. A fair number of us have online homes these days, whether it’s a Wordpress blog with half a dozen readers or a Twitter page with half a million followers. If you happen to post copyrighted material on one of these sites—and you almost certainly do, especially if it’s not monetized—your domain could be blocked, just like that. In the past, the copyright holder could invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which would warn the site to take the material down. There are no such warnings with SOPA.
- Google searches would never be the same. Search engines are slanted as it is, burying certain sites they deem inappropriate or irrelevant. SOPA would put this bias on steroids. Any site that may contain copyright-infringing material wouldn’t appear in the search results. Even direct searches for domain names may turn up blank pages. Worst of all, the decision to block content is at the discretion of the internet service provider, leaving little recourse if a site owner believes he’s been blocked unfairly.
- It could create sneaky company wars, and ideological ones, too. Not everybody would post copyrighted content on a site accidentally. Rival companies could try to snuff out each other’s sites by posting illegal content in their comments and on their forums. And what about political or religious crusaders? Anti-abortion activists could write a copyright-violating comment on Planned Parenthood’s blog to shut the site down. Creationists could write a letter to the editor of an online science magazine that’s riddled with plagiarized content. President Obama’s staff could post copyrighted paragraphs on Mitt Romney’s site. And so on.
- Wikis and photo sites would be things of the past. Who would risk exposing a site to literally billions of users who could accidentally or deliberately post copyrighted content? Wikipedia, Wikileaks, even Flickr and other photo sites would be too much of a liability for site proprietors.
- And more.
