by Alissa Ausan (@ajausan)

Wikipedia is blacked out. Google—ever the homepage chameleon—is wearing a censor bar over its logo.  At the heart of the hubbub: confusing acronyms.

When 4 capital letters get together and cause an uprising, one of three things is usually happening:

1)     A building is burning (let’s say a theater, for a little nod to our First Amendment);
2)     Someone has sworn on an FCC regulated TV network;
3)     There’s some controversial new legislation in Congress.

What we have here is a solid example of #3. SOPA and PIPA are two bills currently in the legislature. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), otherwise known by it’s less sexy name, House Bill 3261, aims to curb online piracy by targeting foreign websites that illegally stream intellectual property belonging to others. (And by “others”, let’s be honest: we’re largely talking about three entities: movie studios, the recording industry, and Rupert Murdoch.)

PIPA is basically SOPA’s Senate cousin, the Protect IP Act. It is not to be confused with Kate Middleton’s kid sister. Pippa Middleton looks fabulous in jeans, whereas PIPA threatens a free and open Internet.

SOPA and PIPA target “rogue” websites, and the first alarming implication is that this definition of “rogue” is pretty vague. Who gets to decide which sites are rogue, are what recourse is available for sites unfairly branded with a big scarlet “R”?

These bills are new but their aim is not—remember the epic battle of the early 2000’s, Metallica versus Napster?

Pirates of the Internet are a lot like pirates of the high seas: they like pillaging, and are generally not headquarted on US soil. This latter fact is the crux of this legislation: it’s very hard to pursue the pirate sites themselves, so instead, SOPA aims to cut off their access to services provided by US entities that the government can oversee, including search engines and payment systems.

With definitions squared away, the biggest question remains: What does SOPA mean for me, the websites I love, the businesses I buy from, the payment method I use to make purchases, and ultimately my government’s legislated view on censorship?

In an oversimplified nutshell, our current legislation (provided largely by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) works on a “notify, take down” basis. Copyright owners are provided a process to notify sites of a violation, and those sites take the offending content down. The onus for policing copyright violations rests with the copyright owners. The responsibility of sites (like YouTube, for example) is to respond when claims are made, and remove content that violates a copyright.

Under SOPA, website themselves would be responsible for proactively policing all content to ensure its legal status. On the surface, this sounds fair enough, right? Even if you secretly love streaming Californication from an off-shores website instead of paying for Showtime, you probably know that those sly little sites with the shifty URL’s are doing something illegal. But this seemingly fair assumption gives way to broadly sweeping implications that factor in almost everything that takes place online.

Using YouTube as an example again, SOPA doesn’t only provide that YouTube would be held responsible for all the videos it streams, but also ads purchased on its paid advertising platform, and the content that exists wherever those ads lead consumers. Further, it applies to user-generated links to outside content that are placed on YouTube.

YouTube reports that 48 hours of video content is uploaded every MINUTE. This is 8 YEARS of content added every day.  Imagine the implication of holding YouTube accountable for verifying copyright status of each and every new upload, let alone paid ad placement and outbound links.

That’s not the end. Think about illegal sites and the content they offer for a fraction of the legal version’s cost. There’s still a cost. And how is it paid? Online payment portals like PayPal and Visa. SOPA covers this too. Visa and PayPal would be in violation of the legislation if they processed payments that were made in exchange for illegally distributed content.  Again, on the surface this seems reasonable. But imagine the volume of transactions per day, and payment portals having the added responsibility of verifying the copyright status of each and every purchase made.

Arguably this is where SOPA makes some marginal sense, much like arguably, payment processing systems are where the rampant online pharmacies of just a few years ago should have been more vulnerable to exposure. But the overarching question still remains: when a site features illegal content, to what degree of separation should guilt extend to unknowingly complicit parties? If YouTube and PayPal can be held accountable for an errant link or an unethical transaction, one that simply served as a bridge between a potentially unaware consumer and an illegal distributor of content, how will that impact those sites’ ability to carry on with business on the whole?

Are the financial interests of those most affected by online piracy more important than the financial impact SOPA may have on others who use the same online systems to conduct business as the pirates do? More importantly: is protecting the ownership of a minority of the content found online worth infringing on the internet’s ability to foster an open and creative exchange of ideas?

We’d love to know what you think.

Read more:
Minnesota Public Radio featured a great discussion about online piracy on Wednesday, January 18. Listen here.

Gawker’s post helps even non-nerds know the SOPA facts.

Google invites you to take action with a quick and easy online petition.

Looking for a Pro-SOPA perspective? Rupert Murdoch unleashes on Google and President Obama on Twitter, Huffington Post has the story.