Justin McCandless

Mozilla's newsletter just came out a few hours ago, and (in addition to online shopping tips) they're informing their readers about the US Congress's Stop Piracy Act.  Right at the top they call the bill "bad for you and the internet - terrible, in fact".  They go on to list a couple of ways the bill will affect the average Firefox user and to show what they can do to help.

If you're at all interested in this, you should check out what the legislation is specifically about (the wikipedia article is a good place to start).  It's easy to get lost among the big companies, organizations, and politicians yelling things at each other, but the bill itself doesn't exaggerate.

To me, the bill seems like it targets a reasonable concern, but goes way too far in using powerful censorship as the solution.  The main concern I get from it is that there are a lot of foreign websites violating US copyright law, with American online advertising money paying them, and the US is powerless to stop the sites.  This is a legitimate concern, I'm sure you know the websites the bill is talking about that allow you to download copywritten American media illegally.  It's also true that in the heaps of ads on these pages, American advertising companies are paying the sites to run.  Maybe the copyright holders should be able to file a complaint or something to have the advertising company remove the ads since the US government can not easily hold the foreign website accountable under US law.  This would be a reasonable idea to debate.  But the Stop Piracy Act goes way further than this.

Under the proposed bill, a complaint filed by a copyright holder could also result in search providers being forced to remove the infringing website from its results and internet service providers being forced to block access to the site.  This is full out censorship as far as you can go, and it's for something as small as copyright violation.  I don't even see why such powerful measures would be suggested to resolve this problem without other motives for opening up this kind of censorship.  And besides this speculation of what could happen with abuse of this power, I don't want the government forcing censorship on any pages, even if they are illegal ones that I don't want to visit.

For me, this bill has some serious censorship hidden under the guise of "stopping online piracy".  After trying to do some unbiased research into it, I'm of the opinion that it is absurdly powerful for the problem it's trying to fix.  So thank you to Mozlila for bringing this bill to the attention of more people, and to the supporters of the bill, talk to me again when there is a bill that reasonably wants to combat online piracy, and not just set a censorship precedent.

Read the Mozilla newsletter online here.