SOPA: Will it Protect Against Internet Piracy or Weaken Creativity?

Those who support the information epoch, tend to consider Internet to be essential and productive in educating its population. However, those who don’t favor content on the internet want to build limitations since they think that some of the content is unnecessary and which might have the power to negatively influence people. As a matter of fact, some of the governments don’t find reasonable for all the information to be posted on Internet, thus they want to censor some of it based on their beliefs. In this case, government as the ruling power selects certain issues, which they think might harm national prosperity. But, this action leads to empowering more the government and leave citizens behind.

Since the Internet burst free of academic cloisters into the public domain during 1990s, it has been thoroughly debated whether the individual’s remarks and comments on the Internet should be restricted. Also this has drawn increasing attention due to popularity of the emerging social net like Facebook and Twitter in recent years. While some advocate that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, others argue that an uncontrollable medium of anarchy may occur owing to the freedom of speech. This paper examines both the arguments for and against of the freedom speech in Internet and provides suggestions based on these arguments. The Internet freedom provides capable and appropriately universally accessible tools to create a new platform to gather voice from the citizens.

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) were big bills recently in the EU and America that caught the attention of nearly every internet user. It was hard to not notice these two bills. These legislations would have pushed copyright infringement on many sites and much of the internet as it is known would have been shut down. On January 18, big sites such as Wikipedia, and Google blacked out their site for a day. This sent a loud and clear message to the creators of this bill and they put it on indefinite hold.

The Internet is like many great inventions, it has some flaws, but the pros definitely outweigh the cons. The Internet has become an educational tool for students, increased communication, and allowed for knowledge of all subjects to be shared. These are but a few benefits of the Internet. Censorship is generally an evil and should be avoided where ever possible (Butt, 2000). The regulation or censorship of the Internet will make it difficult for people to express their mind openly, block even more useful sites for students, and deny American citizens their first amendment right to free speech.

The Internet is an extremely educational and communicative tool. Everyone can access a tremendous amount of information and connect with people on the other end of the planet; it is capable of doing everything. Nowadays, the society is facing a variety of challenges and controversies which are mostly related to religion, morality, the economic crisis, etc., and the most talked-about issue in today’s world is “Internet censorship”. Although the Internet is very useful, many people are suggesting the idea of censoring the Internet; however, the government should not censor the Internet because a free and open Internet usage has many positive impacts on people’s lives. Many opponents say that Internet censorship can protect their children from accessing bad websites which have a lot of violence and sexual content.

The dependance on the internet has become of great importance in today's world, and so imposing regulations and limits to it creates a controversial polemic worldwide. Since the Digital Copyright Millennium Act, internet became more restricted. However, this wasn't so much of a problem because, firstly the internet usage wasn't as common as nowadays, and secondly because the new internet regulations are far more restrictive if not totally limiting to the freedom of the internet. SOPA and PIPA are copyright legislations that fight against online piracy by blocking access to websites judged as insecure, and seek court orders against websites "enabling or facilitating piracy" (BBC, 2012:1). It is war between individuals fighting for global freedom and authorities striving for global security against crimes of copyright infringement.

With internet censorship, certain sites are harder to access and use. Kang says “The internet is a worldwide network that allows individuals to communicate in ways previously unimaginable.”(Kang 1). The internet should stay that way, without censoring. Kang also said “Technical censorship techniques are subject to both over and under blocking since it is often impossible to always block exactly the targeted content without blocking other permissible material or allowing some access to target material…”(Kang 1). If that’s the problem, then they can figure out how to fix it the right way.

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