Or should I say, Que PASA?

I’m going to give you 15 seconds to mentally prepare yourself for another post about SOPA. Perhaps this video will help relax you:

In today’s news about SOPA: Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Yahoo, and Wikipedia are planning to go offline temporarily in protest of the bill sometime in the very near future. This is being called ‘The Nuclear Option.’  It’s an action intended to represent the type and scale of interruptions that we are likely to experience if the bill passes.  If this comes to pass, I suppose I’ll get the day off work along with millions of my fellow countrymen.  It might be nice for a day or two, although I daresay it may cause some ripples in the economy.  Then again, it’s not really very nice at all when you think about the fact that the bill could, in the long-term, present a major threat to my whole industry(one of the most resilient sectors in the US economy).

For those who don’t have a really solid grasp on what SOPA is, but might just have heard a few things about it through the grapevine, here are some of the basics:

Representative Lamar Smith, R-Texas, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act on October 26.

The bill is designed to protect copyrighted materials. It is intended to crackdown on pirates bootlegging music to make loot from advertising, or just for the hell of it.  On the face of it, it doesn’t sound that radical.  The provision of the bill which punishes third party purveyors—entities who provide access to sites that provide pirated materials—is likely to have some extremely negative unintended consequences, however.

The whole discussion about this bill is clouded under a great deal of stress.

Artists and promoters (some, not all) are stressed because it’s hard to make a living these days, with practically everything they produce being available for free on the internet. Internet professionals are EXTREMELY stressed because the level of havoc this law would create on Google by essentially requiring them to dump any site about which there is a complaint—legitimate or not—is likely to cause far more economic chaos than the architects of the bill are probably able to even imagine.

In short, there may be something to the spirit of the bill but realistically its an economic time-bomb. Artist’s should ideally be able to get paid for the work they produce if it is being consumed by large numbers of people who would, in theory, be willing to pay for it if they couldn’t get it for free.  But in practice, it really is a little bit late in the day to be contemplating this kind of sweeping and intricate regulation into a sector that already employs such a large percentage of the total US workforce.  The direction in which the internet has been heading has already changed the direction and organization of our economic infrastructure more than congress is likely to be aware.  Disrupting the operations of the sector by attacking its organizational axes (re: Google, Facebook etc.), is likely to be disastrous.

Soon after the bill was introduced, one of the largest flame wars in Internet broke out.

GoDaddy voiced support, lost millions of customers, and then decided to change their minds. Yahoo quit the Chamber of Commerce due to their irreconcilable differences. Now the well-known hacker group, Anonymous, claims it will punish Sony’s support of SOPA with attacks designed to “dismantle its phantom from the Internet.” Upon hearing this, Nintendo quietly rescinded its support of the bill.

In fact, many of the companies and organizations published on the House of Representatives list of supporters have requested to have their names removed after the repercussions of support were made clear by consumers and activists.

The problem is that SOPA gives the U.S. government power to issue death warrants  to effectively annihilate any website that they want to, via your internet service provider. There will be so many claims that Google will basically have to honor all of them, or else risk being shut down itself.  Your internet service providers will be bound by the law to shut offending websites down if they are deemed to be non-compliant with the rules set forth by SOPA.   To put this into perspective: Google is going to have a GREAT deal of trouble trying to stay compliant which means that, in theory, it could be shut down any time the idea strikes Congress’s fancy.  Effectively, this gives the government the power to decide what you can and can’t look at, which apparently doesn’t sit well with folks in the Land of the Free.

Any site that displays, hosts or links to a media that is not owned by the first party and not used with permission of the copyright holder is subject to blackout. If you are a site that is selling music legitimately, and you have a comment section on your blog, and someone leaves a link to their Pirate site in your comment section, in principle, your site is subject to black-out.

If you had to guess what percentage of time you spend on the Internet looking at original content displayed by its owners or their officially sanctioned promoters, what percentage would you guess? Tumblr would pretty much be wiped out.   Quite a few blogs devoted to news commentary would likely be wiped out.  That relaxing YouTube video up there? Gone.

What about Wikileaks? Would the next WikiLeaks be able to blow up in the environment that SOPA advocates are seeking to create? Forget about it.

SOPA is essentially a Trojan horse law entering under the guise of protection for Hollywood, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America. It will certainly protect them, but it will do so at the expense of…well, free speech and the spirit of the Internet we know and love.

Of course, SOPA supporters don’t believe that, and truth be told, you hear a lot more about people who hate SOPA than love it. The language of the bill does not actively seek to terrorize the world, but it’s so broad that “terror” could easily pass for “enforcement”. CNET addresses this directly in an excellent write-up:

The thing is, Google already does an amazing job of filtering out and assigning low rankings to shady sites. Why would we assume that the government can do a better job than one of the most motivated and innovated companies in the history of commerce? Don’t they already have enough on their plate without taking that on?

Section 103 says that, to be blacklisted, a Web site must be “directed” at the U.S. and also that the owner “has promoted” acts that can infringe copyright.

Here’s how Section 101 of the original version of SOPA defines what a U.S.-directed Web site is:

(A) the Internet site is used to provide goods or services to users located in the United States;
(B) there is evidence that the Internet site or portion thereof is intended to offer or provide such goods and services (or) access to such goods and services (or) delivery of such goods and services to users located in the United States;
(C) the Internet site or portion thereof does not contain reasonable measures to prevent such goods and services from being obtained in or delivered to the United States; and
(D) any prices for goods and services are indicated or billed in the currency of the United States.

Some critics have charged that such language could blacklist the next YouTube, Wikipedia, or WikiLeaks. Especially in the case of WikiLeaks, which has posted internal documents not only from governments but also copyrighted documents from U.S. companies and has threatened to post more, it’s hard to see how it would not qualify for blacklisting.

Congress will return later this month to vote on the bill, and at this point they are expected to pass the bill.

Thomas Doane is a prolific blogger who writes about SEO, social media, email marketing and legislation that starts flame wars.