Anti-piracy acts affect web access

Wikipedia blacked out. Google slapped a black censor bar across its homepage. One hundred ten law professors, two of whom teach at the University of Richmond, signed an open letter to Congress. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) are to blame, but what are these laws, and how do they affect the University of Richmond?

On Jan. 18, many Richmond students navigated their web browsers to Wikipedia to look up a quick fact or to verify a date. Senior Caitlin Kear, who was confused about a term in her reading that morning, said she had searched for a definition on Google.

"Obviously the first thing that pops up is Wikipedia," she said, "so I clicked on that. It was exactly 12:01."

Kear was one minute too late. Wikipedia would not be a resource for anyone that day. Instead of the usual Wikipedia page, she was met with a black screen emblazoned with white script that demanded the site's visitors to "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge" and encouraged them to "Make [their] voice heard."

This message was in protest of SOPA, introduced in Congress on Oct. 26, 2011, and PIPA, introduced on May 12, 2011, according to the Library of Congress website.

Kear said she had had a general idea of what SOPA was.

"I knew it was about limiting the Internet, but I didn't know in what capacity," she said.

Junior Madison Riede also saw the blackout.

She said, "I would sign a petition against it, and I would pay money to not have it passed."

Despite her willingness to protest, she said she had not known exactly what the bill was proposing -- just that it was going to censor the Internet.

Chris Cotropia and Kristen Osenga, law professors at the University of Richmond, signed the open letter to Congress posted on Google and raised concerns over the harmful possibilities of these bills. Both of these bills are no longer active in Congress, but there is a fear that they will return with minor changes, Cotropia said.

As concerned citizens, Richmond students should be aware of this legislation, because it could limit what they would be able to search for here on campus, Cotropia said.

"If we can't trust the Google search results, it kind of hurts the integrity of how the Internet operates," Cotropia said.

The focus of these acts was on foreign websites that posted copyrighted or pirated material. Because the websites were based in other countries, the government did not have jurisdiction over what they were posting, Cotropia said.

"The Content Industry's perspective is, well, one of the ways we might be able to get at these foreign sites is to basically make it difficult for those in the United States to get to them," he said. "So SOPA and PIPA were mechanisms to try to give the industry authority to force those who kind of help operate the Internet's backbone to make it tough for us."

If SOPA or PIPA were put in place, the government would be able to tell an Internet provider, such as Verizon, or even the University of Richmond, that it needed to remove the foreign websites that were problematic from its Domain Name Service listings, Cotropia said.

This would keep the pirated or copyrighted material from circulating in the United States. The impact on students would be limited, unless they were running a foreign site, he said.

Despite this rationale, he still had major concerns with these acts.

"Your site's been taken down, and now you're the one who bears the burden," he said. "Normally it's the other way, even in the comparable situation of, say, a notice and take down of a YouTube video. There, there's a mechanism already in place where the company has to send a letter to YouTube: 'There's a song in this video that we've got the copyright for.'

"Under the current law, YouTube then has to tell you as the uploader, 'There's been this protest. Do you have a response?' And there's a mechanism in place before it just gets yanked."

SOPA and PIPA force this process to be removed from the equation, he said.

Cotropia said his second concern was that the legislation was "going after an ant with an elephant gun." Rather than taking down the illegal parts of a website, the entire domain name would be erased from the listing, he said. If a student were accessing legitimate material on a site that also had pirated or copyrighted material, he or she would lose all access.

He also said that anyone who wanted to get to the websites still could, because they still exist; they just lose their web address and ability to be easily searched.

Cotropia also said that he hoped the publicity of these bills would draw attention toward the actions of the government domestically where domains are already being taken down.

Contact staff writer Maria Rajtik at maria.rajtik@richmond.edu