As if being recorded, wire-tapped and frisked weren’t enough, the government has widened its restrictive scope to include privacy sought by citizens in the World Wide Web. Many of us have resorted to exercising our freedom of thought on some virtual platform to avoid violating any legal conditions regarding verbal expression and now that too may become illegal. The online community has become home to some of the most influential and widespread collaborations of activists and protestors wishing to express their views on various injustices and to unite the world to reclaim its freedom. The result of government control over these communities would be obvious. Communicative efforts would be monitored and screened to only allow the release of ‘government approved’ material to the public.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is under review in the United States and its goal is to eliminate copyright violations on the Internet. However, the act is written for broadened power that does not just restrict copyright infringement. Instead the bill gives the government the ability to exercise complete control over all internet platforms that exhibit breaches in copyright. SOPA will affect social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter as it tampers with their freedom of operation. For example, if you were to upload a video with copyrighted music onto YouTube, the entire website could be removed from the Internet. Websites such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, Twitter and eBay believe this legislature will foreshadow a significant increase in surveillance of their activities to ensure that copyrighted material is not distributed on their respective domains. This could greatly disrupt their daily operations and drastically slow overall productivity. For citizens, this may bring about the downfall of some of our most visited websites!
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