Editorial | Beyond the blackout

Instead of cursing the fact that you couldn’t get on Wikipedia yesterday, it’s time to find out what might be at stake.

On Wednesday, Wikipedia and several other organizations veiled their websites in black to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act.

If enacted into law, these measures would allow copyright holders and the federal government to file court orders against websites associated with copyright infringement. The bills, in theory, would not only penalize websites that host illegal songs but also sites that link to the ones that do.

The proposals would also give courts the ability to order companies to end their dealings with these infringing sites, require search engines to stop listing them and force internet service providers to block these sites entirely.

Part of SOPA and PIPA’s original intent was to better police websites hosted outside of the United States that existed solely for the purpose of sharing pirated information. The proposed law, however, is unnecessarily heavy-handed. In its efforts to target piracy and copyright infringement — which still need viable solutions — SOPA and PIPA risk diminishing our freedom of speech and access to information.

This has great potential to affect the learning culture at Penn, which relies on students’ ability to share and access things freely through the Internet. Every day, students turn to Google and the “free knowledge” that Wikipedia provides to supplement their education.

The Penn community should also take a stance against the blanket measures that SOPA and PIPA propose. As an academic institution, this University benefits greatly from open access to information. This, however, is not to discount the importance of copyrighting information produced by people at Penn.

At The Daily Pennsylvanian, for example, we producer content. Every day, we fill our newspaper and website with original reporting, photographs and graphics — so we understand the importance and value of copyrighting work, especially on the web where it can be easily accessed.

It is in the interest of the DP to protect the work that student journalists produce. But what SOPA and PIPA propose runs the risk of allowing censorship without clear checks and balances. This would hurt rather than help advance our goal of promoting dialog on campus, as Penn’s independent student newspaper.

SOPA and PIPA would give the government undue power to censor and control aspects of the internet. We refuse to believe that these are the only viable solutions to targeting piracy and urge this community to take a stance.

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