Wikipedia goes dark today, in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Ordi­nar­ily I would link to the Wikipedia arti­cle on the Act, but that would be rather coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Instead, I include here some rel­e­vant por­tions of the Wiki article.

The bill would autho­rize the U.S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice to seek court orders against web­sites out­side U.S. juris­dic­tion accused of infring­ing on copy­rights, or of enabling or facil­i­tat­ing copy­right infringe­ment. After deliv­er­ing a court order, the U.S. Attor­ney Gen­eral could require US-​​directed Inter­net ser­vice providers, ad net­works, and pay­ment proces­sors to sus­pend doing busi­ness with sites found to infringe on fed­eral crim­i­nal intel­lec­tual prop­erty laws. The Attor­ney Gen­eral could also bar search engines from dis­play­ing links to the sites.

On its sur­face, this seems like a rea­son­able law. If a site is vio­lat­ing copy­rights, this enables pro­tec­tion of those copy­rights by mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to access the site. But there are some rather dan­ger­ous unin­tended consequences.

First, the use of anony­mous proxy servers may be effec­tively out­lawed. After all, they are often used to bypass Inter­net ser­vice provider block­ing. The tools that are used to bypass such block­ing are mostly made in the United States, so this would chill such devel­op­ment. The same applies to The Tor Project, an Inter­net traf­fic encrypter/​anonymizer.

Sec­ond, the law under­mines the “safe har­bor” pro­vi­sion of the (already oner­ous) Dig­i­tal Mil­le­nium Copy­right Act (DMCA), which places onus on the copy­right own­ers to notify vio­la­tors. Instead, the onus is placed on the website’s oper­a­tor; it requires crowd­sourced sites to police user-​​generated con­tent, and holds the sites’ oper­a­tors liable for users’ vio­la­tions of copy­right. By doing this, the law cre­ates far more risk and higher cost for crowd­sourc­ing web­sites, such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Twit­ter, and even Log­a­rchism.

Finally, the law cre­ates legal juris­dic­tion for the United States over sites located out­side the phys­i­cal juris­dic­tion of the United States. Pass­ing such laws is espe­cially dan­ger­ous, as it tends to cre­ate the juris­dic­tional equiv­a­lent of trade wars. In essence, it’s the oppo­site of treaties, and under­mines inter­na­tional relations.

As some­one who spends a great deal of time both cre­at­ing con­tent and man­ag­ing its dis­tri­b­u­tion, I feel for the copy­right own­ers. But when copy­right butts up against the free exchange of infor­ma­tion, the laws should be held to the same stan­dards as are cen­sor­ship laws. That is, they must be crafted in such a fash­ion as to min­i­mize the impact on free speech. SOPA is a chain­saw, where a scalpel is the appro­pri­ate tool.

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