As Internet services are growing, the problem of piracy increases. In October 2011, the House and Senate of America took up the bill, called “The Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA). The bill takes aim at American search engines like Google and Yahoo, and servers like PayPal, in order to cut off the sources for foreign pirate site (Anonymous, n.pag). It seems that SOPA will be a powerful tool to protect online intellectual properties; however, SOPA will destroy freedom of speech and kill online innovation. This is why American entertainment companies and associations support SOPA but those founders of Twitter, Google, YouTube and human rights organizations stand on the opposite side. Wikipedia website blackout causes students unable to do their homework and readers could not do their daily research (Giles, n. pag). However, the blackouts of websites like Wikipedia and the widespread protest call off the vote on SOPA and halt the legislation.
Copyright has its positive side. Copyright indeed encourages the creation of new works and efficiently prevents some people from copying from existing expression in order to convey their message (Netanel, viii). Copyright also encourages authors to create and disseminate original expression and accords them exclusive rights in their work (Netanel, 6). Also, copyright ensures that readers can obtain ideas distinctly instead of getting the same idea.
However, the losses outweigh the gains. SOPA was vaguely written and would have serious hindered the up-to-now-robust development of the Web (Forbes, V189 I2). “True, original content [on the internet] is rare [because] virtually every domain has at least one piece of copy- righted or protected material on it.” (Donnelly, 4). SOPA not only restrict published contents, it also restrict content shared by readers. Moreover, SOPA is too broad that result in unintended damages. “Larger sites like YouTube and Facebook would have to begin burdensome new monitoring of their users’ activities or risk legal action because a few teenage girls posted a video of themselves bopping around to a copyrighted Katy Perry song.” (Crowley, 12). SOPA will not only expose rogue websites but also those largely innocent websites that have so many readers. Furthermore, service that let users and reader’s post content could be swept up in dragnet cast (Michael, B.1.).
In other fields, copyright limits readers’ access to information. Google Book Search Project wants to make all of the world’s printed books available for digital search with no charge for anyone with access to the Internet, but they can only scan books that published before 1922, which are not under copyright. (Netanel, 24) Copyright is designed to regulate copying, but not regulate reader’s right to read and share (Vaidhyanathan, 152). In the education field, all ownership privatizes ideas and makes them inaccessible to others. The ownership of postsecondary institutions and faculty withhold public access to ideas (Sum and Baez, 10). Some collective works contain materials on which either the copyright has expired or never existed (Patterson L. and Linberg, 130).