In the last few weeks the public's attention was focused on SOPA - Stop Online Piracy Act (bill introduced in the U.S. that fights for intellectual property and against counterfeit goods), PIPA - Protect IP Act (law proposed with the same purpose) and ACTA - Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (document establishing intellectual property rights that was proven to have been signed by Romania too at Tokyo in January 2012). I thought it would be an interesting topic to talk about particularly because of its impact on IT and open-source world.
Briefly, SOPA says that every site that was proven to violate intellectual property should be turned off and also deleted from any search engines after a judicial decision. Moreover, for few films and music illicit downloaded, anyone may be sent to jail up to five years. That is enormous! How can this be punished the same as if you stole from a shop, drove under the influence of alcohol or falsified any documents? SOPA and PIPA would give the U.S. authorities the power to blacklist any sites that does not agree their politics and ideas. This sounds like China's Great Firewall that banns sites that may offend China's national unity, religion, or social organisation. But it cannot be possible to restrict the freedom of speak and diminish the liberty of press. It would be in conflict with the The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The two documents would violate user privacy on internet because proxy-servers (i.e. DNS servers) would no more support anonymous navigation, so that any step on the web will be supervised. Of course every packet will be more attentive inspected, so that any time there will be somebody that knows what sites have you visited or what have you orderer for your favourite on-line bookshop.
Imagine that sites as YouTube or Wikipedia would be turned off because they have user-generated content that may not comply the acts even tough some other content may still be valid. By doing this the two documents bypass the "safe harbor" for sites that host user-content. This says that any offended copyright owner can request the site to remove the content for a period of time.
Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome has an extension called MAFIAAFire Redirector that overcomes any blockings: when a domain is seized the user will be automatically redirected to a mirror from MAFIAAFire.com so this means there will be no downtime. Mozilla has already had problems with this plugin in May 2011 when a security departament from U.S. requested to be deleted from its website. SOPA, as trying to eliminate piracy, will turn off the two browsers. Can you imagine your web experience without Firefox or Chrome?
After the few arguments mentioned above and as a fan of open source and free software, I can be only against the two acts that will eliminate the freedom of surfing the internet and any privacy on the web. Moreover important open-source sites may be banned so that the free travel of information will no more be possible.
