their landing pages to educate visitors.
Video: (25 minutes)
In January 2012. SOPA, the Stop Online
Piracy Act, and PIPA, the Protect Intellectual
Property Act, two controversial pieces of
legislation were making their way through
the US Congress. The bills were drafted on
request of the content industry, Hollywood
studios and major record labels and were
meant to crack down on the illegal sharing
of digital media.
Opponents to the bills had concerns that the
Bills’ passage would give the government
powerful censorship tools that could threaten
free speech.
In protest, in the English-language version
of Wikipedia (then, the world’s 5th largest
website) went dark from midnight January
18th until midnight January 19th, with
information about SOPA and PIPA posted,
encouraging visitors to contact their
representatives in Congress in place of its
usual encyclopedia entries. Many other large
websites followed suit, including the biggest
website in the world, Google, which posted
a link to information about the proposed
legislation.
But it was only one win in a long battle
between US authorities and online users
over internet regulation.
The US government says it must be able
to fight against piracy and cyber attacks.
And that means imposing more restrictions
online. But proposed legislation could
seriously curb freedom of speech and privacy,
threatening the Internet as we know it.
As Quinn Norton, former girlfriend of the
late Internet prodigy, Adam Swartz and a
journalist who covers the Internet, hacker
culture, Anonymous, intellectual property
and copyright issues says here, that legally,
on the Internet (at least for now), “…there
really isn’t any difference… between
copyright violation and speech. So anything
you do to restrict copyright violation is also
a restriction on speech.”
Can and should the internet be controlled?
Who gets that power? How far will the US
government go to gain power over the web?
And will this mean the end of a free and
global internet?
Fault Lines looks at the fight for control of
the web, age and the threat to cyber freedom,
asking if US authorities are increasingly trying
to regulate user freedoms in the name of
national and economic security.
