SOPA and PIPA - What You Need To Know

Tomorrow, web sites around the world will go dark for a period of time to protest two new laws currently being considered by the US Congress - The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

A colleague of mine, Christian Dawson of the web hosting company Servint, has been deeply involved in the battle to stop these two bills from becoming law, and offers this explanation of why both are a bad idea.

People started writing laws to govern the Internet back in the mid '90s. The Internet was new and booming, and lawmakers didn't want to stifle innovation. They constructed a series of laws to govern the Internet that were very pro-business and encouraged innovation, most specifically The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.

The Internet has grown tremendously within the United States as a result of this pro-business legislation, but it's natural that this growth has led to a lot of bad to go along with the whole lot of good.

The problem.

The truth is that there is a major piracy problem on the internet, and it's not just movies and music. People sell counterfeit merchandise. They even sell counterfeit pharmaceuticals-and baby formula. A lot of this stuff is tremendously dangerous and something needs to be done about it. Nobody likes piracy, especially when in some cases it could be deadly.

A pair of bills in Congress called the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act were drafted to address these very real problems. Depending on who you ask, these bills will either "kill the Internet as we know it" or "save the music and movie industries." Let's get to the bottom of what these laws are, and what impact they might actually have.

How do they try to solve it?

PIPA and SOPA were originally drafted with the best of intentions-but somewhere along the way the bills got wildly off track. What we have now are a couple of bills that could be really bad for the United States economy, and the flourishing Internet industry that is growing faster than nearly every other industry we have.

The Protect IP Act, known as PIPA, is the version of the bill that the United States Senate is reviewing. The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, is the version being reviewed by the House of Representatives, which saw its first day of active discussion in mid-January of 2012.

Both bills attempt to shut off access to content that is alleged to be infringing. They do this by attacking web sites accused of housing that content, from four main angles:

• Their access to advertising
• The money those sites earn
• Their DNS
• Their web hosting

Advertising and money are pretty simple to understand. The other two may take some help. DNS is something like a technical postal address. When you type a web address into your browser, DNS tells it what path to take. Web hosting is the place your website lives-the computer the website operates out of-kind of like a brick and mortar storefront. Hosting websites is what my company, ServInt, does.

Does using this methodology solve the problem?

No. In this case their prescribed cure is far worse than the initial ailment.

How can we best illustrate that? Imagine that instead of a website we were talking about a traditional store, like Home Depot.

Under current law, if you saw something on the shelf at Home Depot that you thought was counterfeit, you could alert Home Depot and, under the threat of possible future legal action, work with them to get that content off the shelf.

If PIPA and SOPA applied to brick and mortar stores and became law, you would instead immediatelybe able to:

• get their landlord to close the store
• require newspapers to stop running their ads
• make banks close their accounts
• and remove their address from every phone book and every GPS.