SOPA and PIPA

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) have been making headlines in past months and gaining a lot of negative attention as major websites such as Wikipedia schedule blackouts in protest.

If you haven’t been following this story over the past few months, here are the facts. Media companies are investigating new ways to fight and prevent piracy. We’ve all heard about large torrent and pirate sites forced to shut down. Enter SOPA, in the U.S. House of Representatives, and PIPA in the U.S Senate which aim to fight foreign copyright infringement

As Jared Newman of PCWorld reported, “In one method, the U.S. Department of Justice could seek court orders requiring Internet service providers to block the domain names of infringing sites” (2012).

What I think is most concerning is that these proposed bills will censor what we can see on the Web. For now, this legislation is only proposed in the U.S. but I fear that Australia may follow suit if they are successful. We already complain that we live in a ‘nanny state’ and so imagine the impact of Internet censorship bill, where what we see online is controlled and managed heavily by the government.

Apparently, 41 human rights organisations and 110 prominent law professors in the U.S. have expressed grave concerns about these two bills. How do you feel about Internet censorship in Australia and across the world? Think about what it would mean and how it could impact your online habits. 

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