Congress considers bill targeting piracy, infringed content

Wednesday marked National Censorship Day, and Congress took part in hearings for a bill that, if passed, would reserve the right to censor access to particular websites that are gateways for illegally hosted material.

The website americancensorship.org was at the forefront of opposition to the bill. It highlighted several of the potential roadblocks it claims will become reality in the event the bill is passed.

The website warned against “website blocking, risk of jail for ordinary users and chaos on the internet.”

“It becomes a felony with a potential five-year sentence to stream a copyrighted work that would cost more than $2,500 to license, even if you are a totally noncommercial user, e.g. singing a pop song on Facebook,” according to the website.

The Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property, or Protect IP Act, is also referred to as U.S. Senate Bill S-968. The bill was introduced in May of this year by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont with 39 co-sponsors.

A House version of the bill, called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or H.R. 3261, was introduced Oct. 26.

The bill’s objective is to provide the federal government, along with copyright holders in the entertainment industry, the ability to block access to sites that host infringed content by not allowing individual users access to the site’s domain name. However, the user could still access the site by obtaining its IP address and entering it into a web browser.

Students reacted to Congress’ deliberations Wednesday.

“Trying to censor the entire Internet is just not going to work,” sophomore Victoria Weitbrecht said. “I think people are on Facebook and Twitter too much anyways, so if we got rid of (access to copyrighted material on these sites), I wouldn’t go into outrage.”

But, he said other people would be upset. Weitbrecht said students’ reaction depends upon how far the bill goes to censor certain websites. If social media is shut down, he said he thinks people will very upset.

Sites like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, eBay and Mozilla, sent a letter addressed to Senate and House members proposing that Congress reconsider the bill’s effects, the Washington Post reported.

Protesters of the bill made numerous online video announcements that the bill is the start of something much bigger than a movement against online piracy within the entertainment industry.

Video announcements, such as those hosted on americancensorship.org said PROTECT IP, could hurt new startups because it allows for companies to sue any website “they feel isn’t doing their filtering well enough.”