SOPA, PIPA and Us

The most important thing to remember about freedom is that it’s never really free. Yours was paid for in blood and tears, by the struggle of your ancestors through the passage of time. Some got theirs much later and some, sadly, still need to be freed. There are people who want to take away your freedoms. The other important thing to remember about freedom is that it is never completely secure. We not only fight to obtain freedom, we must fight to retain it.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senatorial equivalent, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) are being protested today across the internet. But what are they and why should we be worried?

Basically, the acts are propositions with the goal of combatting online piracy and the means used to promote it – especially that which is hosted on servers not within the United States where regulation is already fairly strictly observed. Under the proposed new laws, if a person was found to have downloaded or streamed copyrighted material ten or more times in a six month period, they would face up to five years in prison. So, download Michael Jackson’s Bad album and you could spend a year longer in prison than the doctor that caused his death.

[drop2]SOPA and PIPA aim to give the US Government and copyright holders the ability to seek court orders for the removal of sites that are “enabling or facilitating” online piracy. SOPA extends this to search engines that return results which contain prohibited links. So theoretically, Google could be suspended because it links to the Pirate Bay which tracks torrent files enabling piracy. Movie studios would have means to silence free sources of information. It’s a system which even the least knowledgeable of us can see is open to extremely worrying levels of abuse.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) would be prohibited from dealing with alleged copyright infringers – without proof of infringement. So would sites like PayPal and any advertisers, effectively cutting off all sources of income for websites alleged to assist in the infringement of copyright.

Until very recently, SOPA and PIPA also contained clauses which would allow for DNS blocking to prevent certain sites from appearing to users at all. That’s a measure which is currently used by Iran and China to prevent their citizens from accessing information which may conflict with what their government wants them to know. This measure has since been dropped from each act but it was on the grounds that it would undermine the way the internet works, rather than any civil rights objection.

We should be clear here: piracy is bad. Taking something which isn’t yours, against the wishes of the person who made it is wrong, it always will be. It’s hard enough to get anywhere in a creative field without losing out on your best work. The protests aren’t in favour of piracy, obviously, they’re in opposition to the loss of something extremely important to US law and, to a wider point, law in other free countries throughout the world. SOPA and PIPA sidestep the need for due process.

The simple principle of due process means that you shouldn’t be punished for a crime without there being a comprehensive investigation and a fair trial. SOPA and PIPA allow for punishment when a crime has only been alleged. Essentially, it takes the rights of the individual – things like freedom of expression – and makes them subject to the suspicions of copyright holders. Even without considering the disparities between the terms “copyright holder” and “creator”, that is fundamentally opposed to what most people would consider fair.

So, you might be asking yourself what this all has to do with videogames? Well, as creative works, games are included in the acts. SOPA and PIPA would mean that this website, hosted in the UK, could become subject to the accusations of rights holders. We could be removed for posting screenshots that a big publisher doesn’t want shown. We could be prohibited from posting trailers if the publisher doesn’t want us to report on them for any reason – if our previous reporting isn’t favourable, for example.

What SOPA and PIPA will do is remove the voice of the internet. Parody videos on YouTube, animated GIFs, funny meme pictures which use a character or likeness could all be gone. Sites like Wikipedia would struggle with media and everyone would struggle with an article’s accompanying imagery and video content. This applies not only to the content but to the sites that host that content and the methods you might use to find it. Gone.

Everything on the internet would need to be more closely monitored for fear that it would cause an allegation, meaning that forums and places where information is shared freely would be heavily moderated and more stringently censored.

TheSixthAxis is not joining in with the blackout that many sites are taking part in to protest SOPA and PIPA. We don’t want to punish our users for the foolishness of their leaders. However, we do support the immediate removal of both proposals and we urge you all to write to your political leaders expressing your concern. This is especially important if you’re one of our US readers as it’s your Representatives and Senators that will be deciding the future of these two acts. But make no mistake, this is not simply an issue in the US. SOPA and PIPA will be carefully watched by governments around the world and if they are allowed to pass in the US then it will only be a matter of time before similar proposals are raised elsewhere.

SOPA and PIPA are currently being reviewed with the aim of rewriting them to make them less egregious to people who want to retain the freedom to share information. Let the people in power know that you support a creator’s right to their material but not at the expense of freedom of expression. Continue to fight for your freedom and the freedoms of others.