I have to admit, my first reaction to most online petitions and campaigns is to be somewhat annoyed by the self-righteous nerds who are pushing them on other people. It just seems so easy to fight for a cause by being loud and obnoxious on the internet without actually doing anything. Add to this the fact that most self-respecting tech geeks will automatically jump on board with anything that even remotely challenges government and/or corporate entities, and you’ve got a lot of sheep shooting off their mouths without thinking for themselves. On the other hand, I also can’t stand the people who are so oblivious and apathetic that they think nothing in the world will ever affect them directly.

Putting all of those feelings aside, this SOPA thing is kind of a big deal. As much I’d like to think that a U.S. bill should have no influence on someone living in Canada, the truth is, the U.S. controls the internet whether we like it or not. This bill could change the face of the internet, and as someone who runs a handful of blogs I am particularly concerned because it could even land me in jail through no fault of my own.

The idea is that the U.S. Department of Justice can essentially block the domain of any website that enables or facilitates copyright infringement (a vaguely defined concept that could mean simply linking to another site with pirated material) and pursue legal actions against them. Film Junk receives hundreds of spam comments every day that link to websites with illegal content, and we would now be liable for them… not to mention having to closely monitor our own posting of mash-up videos, images, and any other potentially copyrighted material. Clearly any website with user-submitted content would be in big trouble.

I find it interesting that Google itself is not being called into question here. If providing a link to pirated material is all it takes to be culpable, then isn’t Google the ultimate facilitator of copyright infringement on the internet? True, right now they’re already being forced to remove certain links from their search results due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but there is no way that they can possibly catch everything that’s out there. On any given day, I guarantee you there will be an infinite amount of links from Google to some sort of copyrighted material. If you take this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you might as well just shut down the entire internet.

I understand that they can’t let piracy go unchecked, and I think that (sadly) some of the scare tactics that the RIAA and MPAA have tried in the past probably do work to a certain extent. But ultimately you just can’t stop piracy, and there are much better solutions that they could be putting their time and money into. Services like Spotify and Netflix have been significantly reducing piracy over the past year or two… so why don’t they help them grow instead? If these organizations think that they can rewire the entire internet just to serve themselves, they’ve got another thing coming.

So yeah, I’m with the self-righteous nerds on this one, and I think it’s pretty clear that today’s internet blackout has actually done its job. Visit AmericanCensorship.org to find out what you can do to stop SOPA.