SOPA in Traditional Media
So, I just want to throw this out there to people, but I’ve been finding it interesting to think about SOPA in terms of traditional media in order to better grasp the somewhat nebulous situation in the realm of digital media.
I think the problem everyone has with this legislation is that it targets and forces responsibility on those that provide transmission (ISPs) and some of the foundational systems of the Internet, such as searching for content (Google) or giving users tools to produce content (WordPress and YouTube).
So, what I ask myself is would we ask the United States Postal Service to look through mail making sure there’s no copyrighted content being sent around the country? Do our notebooks need sensors in them that would report if someone wrote down some copyrighted content without authorization? It seems vaguely totalitarian to me, and I think that’s the point of all this. Especially because these systems are so far-reaching and often automatic, the lack of safeguards is really troubling.
It also really puts the power behind the large corporations and takes it away from individual artists in a lot of ways. Through automatic detection systems, I’ve had a video I created entirely myself be flagged as possibly infringing material. Right now, YouTube lets it slide. They didn’t even take it down, probably because they know their detection stuff isn’t perfect. As soon as we start to put more power into those kind of filtration systems, the sooner I’m left with my video gone, and not really wanting to bother doing anything about it because I’m just a college student living on student loans, and I can’t afford to go up against some company that somehow now thinks they own MY copyright.
Does this seem like a legitimate way to frame it? Does it even make sense to try to compare what’s going on here to how things are done traditionally outside the Internet? I’m interested in seeing what people have to say.
Tags: #en3177, censorship, copyright, Internet, law, legislation, SOPA
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January 25, 2012 at 12:20 am
I think sensoring the internet would be close to impossible. Where would they start? What would they ‘sensor’? The internet isn’t a bad thing/place necessarily. I know a few friends that have looked stuff up online because they were to embarrassed to ask people. Sure, there are some bad things out there, but I think the internet is used for more good then bad.