I am concerned that enactment of the proposed House "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) would put a huge, unnecessary and ultimately ineffective burden on website owners to police user-contributed links for possible copyright infringement. Such legislation would destroy the vibrant and interactive internet community, and impair citizens' ability to exercise their First Amendment rights.
To provide a personal example of the way this Act would impact, I am a recent Houston Marathon runner with a long history of running and health related interests, and maintain as a pure labor of love the blog: http://RunInAmerica.com. To learn from my visitors I invite them to post comments, and on many occasions they kindly provide helpful links to other sites. While I check that such links are valid, I have no way to verify that violations of copyrights do not exist on such sites. Thus, enactment of SOPA would effectively force me to disable all user-contributed comments, and to delete those which were previously posted. In fact, even if I had an effective way to determine copyright violations, such an unnecessary burden would literally be never ending as I would need to continually re-visit such links ad infinitum.
Additionally, SOPA would adversely affect other sites that I frequently reference and value (e.g. Wikipedia.com, DailyMile.com, NYTimes.com, WSJ.com and Chron.com). Presuming such legislation was enacted all of these sites, and many others, would be forced to curtail user-contributed input - effectively destroying the vibrant culture of the web. SOPA and PIPA therefore directly infringes upon U.S. Citizens' First Amendment rights to the detriment of society. For these reasons, I strongly urge you to reject any legislation such as SOPA or PIPA.
Finally, here's a great song which highlights the issue superbly:
Great post Mark! As always, thanks for keeping up informed. Hope you are recovering well from the Houston marathon!
ReplyDeleteGreat post and note to your congressman, I hope that bill gets defeated. I heard that Hollywood lobbied hard to get this bill passed, but the general public has spoken loud and clear that they don't like it. The power of the Internet.
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