JUST WHEN I was assigned to write about the SOPA and PIPA, obviously against the bills, given the tirade and the criticism it is facing across the world, I thought of discussing the merits of the bills as well. Next step was to research and as a genuine Internet user would do, I typed merits of the bill in the Google (which didn’t prefer shutting down like Wikipedia) but to my utter shock, I didn’t come across any such article. Well, the people who have framed the bills must have written about the merits, isn’t it their responsibility? May be there is no such merit, I was forced to assume. Anyways that doesn’t speak well of the free American society or may be that exists in movies and books that we have been watching and reading since the age of 10!

January 18 is now referred as the ‘Black Wednesday as many websites including Wikipedia and Reddit shut down in protest against the ‘draconian bills’ that are accused of curbing the free speech. Besides these non-profit websites, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo also oppose the bills and kept flashing the protest messages on their websites all day yesterday.

The bills, as such have been framed to stop online piracy by curbing the illegal online copying and sharing of movies and music on the Internet and the operations of foreign fake websites that dupe American customers. As such the bills would allow government to shut down any website that is found with copyright-infringement content. Let us discuss Facebook as an example; infringing linking, photos or videos, posted on this social networking tool could give government a reason to shut down Facebook or at least affect its business as the matter will go to courts, which will take their time to decide the merits of the cases. This means Facebook would have to pre-screen all the user-generated content before publishing them. Does that mean, if you post a link on Facebook, you will get a message that you post has been successfully posted after few hours or maybe you will get a message that your link is infringed, sorry! We can’t post it due to copyright issues.

Doesn’t that mean that the very essence of social networking will be thrown to the dogs? Yes, you can share nothing except you mood messages and beware; you won’t be allowed to post quotes of celebrated authors and philosophers. The same would apply to Twitter, LinkedIn and Google plus as well.

People have been relying heavily on Twitter for news and happenings around the world but given the fear of these bills, one is not sure how long it will continue without getting trapped in copyright infringement. Though the aim behind these bills, to curb online piracy, mainly to illegally download, movies, music and software is completely understood but the legislation will sink the free Internet ship as well.