Alice Lee | Save the internet, #StopSOPA

If the Stop Online Privacy Act passed and went into effect, I think I would miss Kanye West’s tweets the most.

They range from rambling diatribes to the endearingly bizarre and never fail to make me laugh out loud. Sounds trivial, but they represent one of the coolest things about the internet: the ability for a superstar like West to connect to a student like me as well as share information freely and instantaneously.

I’d also miss Tumblr blogs, my Flickr photography friends, my Facebook friends (who I also see in real life), Reddit posts, YouTube videos … the list goes on. Indeed I would sorely miss all these sites. Maybe some of you got a taste of this too on Wednesday when Wikipedia and countless other organizations blacked out their sites to protest the SOPA and PROTECT IP Act.

SOPA and PIPA are well intentioned but entirely misguided attempts at protecting online intellectual property. Instead, they threaten the very foundation of free speech and communication that the internet is built on. If passed, they will give the government and copyright holders the right to file court orders against and shut down entire websites that contain any counterfeit content. Basically, any site that has user-generated content either has to constantly police the massive amount of data that streams through everyday or face being shut down by the government.

Not only would this be extremely difficult for companies to maintain, Communication professor Carolyn Marvin said, “ultimately you would have a very clogged court system and a lot of confusion as to what the law was, and piracy would not stop.” The bills would also stifle future iterations of what they’re trying to protect — innovation.

For Engineering freshman Nicholas Meyer, “the cool thing about sites like Facebook and Google is that they went from a few college students to billion dollar companies and with SOPA the barrier to entry for other entrepreneurs would be much higher.”

Meyer, along with fellow freshman Engineer Tess Rinearson and Carnegie Mellon University sophomore Drew Inglis, created a web application called Grassroutes that allows users to easily and quickly contact their local political representatives about SOPA — a service that I encourage anyone who wants to meaningfully rally against SOPA and PIPA to use. SOPA “de-incentives the prospects of doing anything new and interesting on the internet,” Rinearson added.

But what about the underlying issue that SOPA points to? Beyond the fact that it’s an entirely too heavy-handed approach to the problem of internet copyright infringement, there’s no denying that this problem exists and needs to be solved.

A similar parallel can be drawn from the history books: in the 16th and 17th centuries, England was rocked by a new revolutionary technology: the printing press. The Tudors and Stuarts instituted various types of censorship laws and in effect, were determined to read and authorize every single book to be printed to make sure that no content was stolen.

As we know, this is far from realistic. Technology eventually outstripped their means, forcing them to change their notion of ownership over information and come up with the concept of private copyright.

A similar thing now needs to happen for us.

If the Tudors couldn’t do it, how can the government expect sites like YouTube to sift through every single video to verify the authenticity of their users’ content?

So let me ask: What, in this digital day and age, ought to be the true and fair value of a copyright? (Disclaimer: I don’t know, or else I’d be suggesting it to Congress right now). Whatever it is, it’ll be something that our society will slowly and over a long period of time transition towards, and can’t be fixed overnight with a single bill.

What I do know is that bills like SOPA and PIPA are counterproductive — and thankfully they’ve inspired a large amount of negative backlash. While that’s good, PIPA will pass through Senate on Jan. 24, while SOPA has been shelved for a February vote.

So in the meantime, let’s send a message to Congress through the very online channels they threaten to shut down. Facebook it, Tweet it (government officials do monitor the tweets they get), send in letters, write emails and make some calls — and help others do the same.

There are few things than shout louder than the collective voice of the users of the internet (Kanye’s included) — so let’s get started.

Alice Lee is a Wharton junior from Cupertino, Calif. After taking an eight-month leave of absence from Penn to work at Foursquare she is back on campus.Her email address is leealice@wharton.upenn.edu. Through The Looking Glass appears every other Friday.

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