This Is My Rifle: The Death of Free Speech - Pt. 1 SOPA

By now most of you have heard of SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and it’s counterpart in the Senate- PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act). If by chance you missed Nathan S’ write-up about it last week, I’m sure you were filled in by the millions of other websites covering the atrocious bills being pushed in both the Senate and House of Representatives. While both SOPA and PIPA have been temporarily “shelved”, they have not disappeared but are merely under review and now a new bill has joined them, ironically titled, OPEN (Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act). Having actually read all 71 pages of the SOPA bill, let me be the one to tell you that what’s at stake here is far greater than the ability to download music or stream movies online. What we’re facing is the end of free speech as we know it.

In brief summarization, SOPA targets the online distribution of copyrighted material. Under this bill, SOPA would allow the United States government to effectively shut down and prosecute any and all domestic websites found to be posting or linking to material in which they do not own the copyright. This means music, movies, articles and virtually anything not owned outright by the website itself. If you understand how the Internet works then you know that this would be the end of sharing information within the digital medium. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and literally every music blog and website would be rendered useless or cease to exist at all. Foreign websites found to be distributing copyrighted material would be blocked by service providers and removed from domestic search engines. Any American companies advertising on these websites would be forcibly cut off and any domestic funds paid to the foreign website would be met with intervention from the American government.

Perhaps the most troubling part of SOPA is in regards to what is referred in Section 202 as “the disclosure of classified information, impairment of combat operations, or other significant harm to a member of the Armed Forces, or national security”. The problem with the language in this section (and the rest of the bill for that matter) is that it’s extremely vague. At no point is there any detail provided as to what would be classified as “harm to national security”, and coupled with the Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act (more on that next week), virtually any site that the government determines to be a threat could be labeled an “enemy combatant” and shut down. Also, under SOPA, the people behind the targeted websites could be fined $500,000-$30,000,000 and could face anywhere from 1-30 years in prison.

Once you read the bill it becomes clear that SOPA isn’t a bill to protect the music, movie and pharmaceutical industries (yup, they’re in there too. I didn’t know that counterfeit pharmaceuticals were such a problem) but it’s a bill to regulate what is being said and shared on the Internet. If SOPA/PIPA/OPEN is passed into law it gives the American government the power to determine what sites are considered “safe” and disassemble sites they perceive as being a threat. In co-sponsor Senator Joe Lieberman’s own words, he said, “Cyber war is going on right now. Our civilian infrastructure, the Internet that runs the electric grid, the telecommunications grid, transportation, all the rest is constantly being probed by nation states, some terrorist groups and by organized criminal gangs. And we need this capacity in a time of war. We need the capacity for the President to say, ‘Internet service provider, we’ve got to disconnect the American Internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country. Or we’ve got to put a patch on this part of it’”… “This is a matter of national security. A cyber attack on America can do as much or more damage today by incapacitating our banks, our communications, our finance, our transportation as a conventional war attack”… “Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of it’s Internet in a case of war and we need to have that here too”.

That’s right. No mention of the music or movie industries whatsoever. Just the same old “terrorists are coming to kill us, run for the hills!” jargon we’ve become all too familiar with from the American government. And now, not only do they want to bomb your family, they also want to steal your Facebook and Twitter information as well! Imagine the horror when you sign into Facebook one morning and your status has been set to “I’m a fag” courtesy of some Muslim guy in a cave somewhere. How will your public image ever recover? The depression inflicted by the lack of “likes” and “retweets” might just cause you to lose faith in your country altogether. What if an Iranian hacker gets into Twitter and shuts the whole thing down for a day? Where will you go to share your infinite wisdom in 140 characters? What will the world be without gems like, “Just ate a cheeseburger. Now on my way to work” or “OMG this guy at the gym keeps checking me out. #Creeper”.

I know, it could be a lot worse than that. But if American banks and military institutions haven’t taken the proper measures to safeguard themselves from an external threat via the Internet then they’re too stupid to be on the Internet in the first place. Maybe they should take the trillions of dollars handed to them by the government a put a few million into securing their databases.

But wait, China has the answer. They’ve taken the necessary steps to actively patrol their Internet and they don’t have a problem with copyright infringement. I mean, it’s not like they pump out bootleg albums, movies, designer garments and basically anything that can be counterfeited and flood the world markets with them, right? I’ve never walked into a Chinese store and bought pirated Xbox games, movies that aren’t even out yet with Chechnyan subtitles, a fake Louis Vuitton wallet and matching scarf. That’s crazy talk!

The Chinese government doesn’t sit around all day searching the Internet for people downloading music illegally, they use their power to source out dissent and put an end to it. One thing Senator Lieberman forgot to mention was that China is a communist country. So maybe comparing the United States of America to China sheds some light into the true intentions behind SOPA and reveals what they’re really trying to do. And the fact that the major record labels and movie studios have gotten behind this bill just goes to show how far behind they truly are. As Nathan pointed out in his article yesterday, the Internet is here now and you can’t stop it. Maybe instead of trying to keep people from finding and downloading music and movies for free, they should be more creative in the presentation of their product. If they didn’t spend so much time focusing on how to squeeze the buying public out of a few extra dollars, perhaps they wouldn’t be losing so much business to the independent labels and smaller studios.

I don’t know about you, but in my opinion losing our right to free speech so some asshole at Universal can sign another Justin Bieber and buy a solid gold Rolls Royce just doesn’t seem like much of a fair trade.

(Jason James is an artist, freelance columnist and writer for RefinedHype.com. You can listen/download his most recent album, "Marvelous World Of Color", here and you can contact him here and here.)

See Also: CounterPoint: RIP The Internet & F*** Your Free Speech.