The Internet Braces for the Horrors of the Possible Passing of the SOPA Bill
Steve Barton
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We already have to endure the censorship of our movies, and now we are possibly going to have to contend with the censorship of our Internet. This is strange and truly frightening news we feel compelled to make you aware of. Read on and hope for the best.
What is SOPA? Known as the “Stop Online Piracy Act” in full, SOPA stands ready to make censorship of the Internet a matter of law.
But wait a second; isn’t piracy bad? We certainly think so. And we support the call for better tools to protect intellectual property rights.
So why is SOPA a bad thing? Glad you asked. If this bill passes, sites like ours could be shut down without notice or, even worse, sued for any of the following reasons:
– Linking to or covering infringing work: Including but not limited to leaked artwork, trailers, screenplays. Even screenshots used in our news coverage and reviews.
– Hosting supplemental audio commentaries like we did for Joe Lynch with his lost commentary track from Wrong Turn 2.
– Reusing video clips and sound bytes as in our retrospectives:
– Sharing links to remixes and funny edits of movies:
Now obviously those videos fall under fair use, you say. We agree. But SOPA is a shoot first, ask questions later kind of bill. There is little to no due process afforded in the legislation.
– Links to torrent sites or streaming sites:
We do not post links to torrent sites ourselves. But if a link were to be found on our site, whether posted as spam by a robot or a user in a comment or message board post, we could be shut down without warning.
While we try our best to prevent spam on this site, from time to time these bots do get through our defenses. Furthermore, a lot of torrent sites steal our images of DVD cover art against our knowledge. They link to our images so that they don’t have to pay for the hosting themselves. We block as many as we can from doing this, but it is difficult to catch. Sadly, according to this bill, we can be shut down because we are hosting the images even though they are being used without our knowledge.
Not only is all that considered a criminal act by this bill, but even more startling is that YOU the user could be put in jail for up to 5 years for posting or sharing this content ANYWHERE.
This bill will require us to censor every single comment or post on this site as well as monitor every single use of a file hosted by our site or risk having our revenue stripped away, our site blocked, or being outright sued.
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
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