For those who thinks that SOPA isn’t bad

Fol­low @GazaliAhmad

There are still peo­ple who are clue­less about SOPA and PIPA.

I don’t live in USA so it shouldn’t really bother me right? Any­way copy­right hold­ers must be pro­tected. That’s where you’re dead wrong.

The Inter­net is a global net­work. What the US does affects every­one else. There are already myr­iad laws pro­tect­ing intel­lec­tual property.

What SOPA and PIPA want to do is basi­cally con­trol and dis­rupt advance­ment of tech­nolo­gies, now and in the future.

One good exam­ple is DRM or Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ment. Basi­cally DRM tech­nolo­gies attempt to give con­trol to the seller of dig­i­tal con­tent or devices after it has been given to a consumer.

For dig­i­tal con­tent this means pre­vent­ing the con­sumer access, deny­ing the user the abil­ity to copy the con­tent or con­vert­ing it to other formats.

For devices this means restrict­ing the con­sumers on what hard­ware can be used with the device or what soft­ware can be run on it.

Some­times the DRM soft­ware inter­feres with the devices ren­der­ing them unsta­ble. Thank­fully DRM can eas­ily be bypassed and now most dig­i­tal con­tent are DRM-free.

Recently Megaupload.com was shut down. Even with­out the SOPA and PIPA leg­is­la­tions, a site can still be shut down.

Those that upload the files there can no longer accessed it. Not all the files vio­lated copy­rights, prob­a­bly a lot are orig­i­nal works.

If I were to upload a movie and kept it in a pri­vate link and share only with a few friends, am I a doing any­thing wrong?

What’s the dif­fer­ence if I start a pri­vate DVD club and mem­bers buy dif­fer­ent titles for a com­mon library and we have weekly pri­vate screen­ings and mem­bers can bor­row other titles for their viewing?

Fun­da­men­tally SOPA and PIPA want to do is to pre­vent you from shar­ing con­tent, period. Thank­fully the bills were dropped for now.

Here’s an inter­est­ing video (non-technical) on Why SOPA is a bad idea:

 Fea­tured Image: SOPA / PIPA