Many websites (a reported 7,000 so far) will be dark today, in protest of the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP (PIPA) bills.  For those who aren’t closely keeping up with the story, there are clear and passionate battle lines drawn and anyone working in the media or running a website or blog should be watching:

  • Critics of SOPA and PIPA claim the proposed bills are serious threats to the freedom of the Internet.  Sites like Wikipedia, Google, Reddit, WordPress and thousands of others, along with countless tech companies and Internet entrepreneurs of all types oppose the two bills.  They also claim it will force website owners into a mess of impossible monitoring and oversight, and ultimately put them at risk due to the actions of others.
  • Proponents of the bills claim the actions are necessary and will crack down on online piracy, further protect copyrighted work, and allow the blockage of foreign websites that are engaged in piracy and fall outside of U.S. jurisdiction.  Movies studios and major record labels support the two bills.

Like all bills before Congress, there’s a lot more to them and that’s where things can get sticky, but those are simple explanations of both sides.

On the one hand, freedom of speech on the Internet is vital.  On the other, as much as we like movies and music, unless the artist says otherwise, we’re not entitled to enjoy them for free just because some guy illegally uploads it to his website.  But WordPress, as a company, shouldn’t be liable or face complete government blockage just because Joe Hacker goes rogue and uploads the new Mission Impossible movie to his blog for anyone to download.  There are 70,000,000 million WordPress blogs out there.  They’d have to hire nearly 10,000,000 people to monitor and double check everything.

Like most things, this is all about money and liability (and Internet traffic).  And while it may appear very black and white to some, there is a lot of gray area.  There are ways to protect freedom on the Internet, while also protecting artists and copyrighted work, and also limit liability from disassociated owners who can’t possibly monitor millions of pages per-day.

Both SOPA and PIPA have very good intentions, and websites like Reddit and Wikipedia aren’t protesting because they endorse piracy or want artists to get ripped off, but (as we’re told) it’s the fine print, potential legal threats, and the potential oversight power the U.S. Government could have on all of the Internet that’s getting in the way.

We’re calling it the SOPA OPERA, we hope both sides come to a very fair agreement soon.  But the outcome will have an impact on how we all do business on the Internet, so let’s stay tuned.