SOPA And PIPA

You may have noticed a number of sites around the internet either going offline, or blacking themselves out today, in protest of two bills in the US Congress that were recently set to pass with nearly unanimous consent of both Republicans and Democrats. An enormous opposition movement has popped up among tech, game, and internet companies, and the bills are now stalled pending further review, but the Democratic (Senate) and Republican (House) leaders are still set on moving forward with them at some point, so it's still important to mention.

Here's a description of what these bills do in a nutshell, and why our users should be concerned.

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Probably the most important provision of online copyright law is something called the DMCA Safe Harbor Provision. This legal provision says that someone who hosts a site that allows user content (example: Google, which links to other sites, FFXI, which allows user chat, or even our site, which allows forum posts) is a legally separate entity from their users, as far as copyright violations are concerned.

In plain English, this means that if one of you decides to make a forum post linking to or re-posting copyrighted content, you are legally responsible. You can be sued. But as long as we make a good faith effort to remove the content as soon as we're notified, we (meaning Scragg, Cliff, and I) cannot be held personally responsible, nor directly sued for violation of copyright ourselves.

Similarly, Safe Harbor means that we cannot be held responsible for sites that we link to, should those sites violate copyright. In other words, if gamerescape, or wikia, or any of the sites linked in our item pages violate copyright somewhere on their own pages, that's their problem -- not ours.

The only way for a copyright holder to take legal action against FFXIAH.com is if they take us to court, and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that we purposely and actively engaged in the violation of copyright ourselves. Which is a pretty high bar to reach.

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SOPA and PIPA essentially remove the Safe Harbor provision. In other words, if one of you decides to link to copyrighted content on our forum, we are now directly and personally responsible, and can theoretically be sued for copyright violation as though we were the ones doing it ourselves. Similarly, if a site we link to (like wikia) decides to violate copyright, we can also be held responsible just for linking to them.

Worse, the bills remove the requirement to even take us to court. Copyright holders themselves (private entities) can now go straight to the internet's DNS authorities (the master address listing for all sites on the web) and file a complaint. This will immediately knock FFXIAH.com offline without so much as a court ruling. It's then incumbent upon us to fight back in court and earn the right to bring the site back.

Copyright holders argue this is necessary because they lose money for every second a site is allowed to link to, or feature, copyrighted content. They argue they need ultimate power to knock sites off the internet immediately, and only deal with the burden of proof later.

They promise to only use their new powers "sparingly" and "responsibly." I'm sure you can all guess how that one will end.

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This makes the internet a very dangerous place to operate. Google could be held responsible for returning links to any sites that could even possibly feature copyrighted content. (Which is most of them.) We could be forced to pre-censor all forum and user content for copyright violations before we could even put them online. Arguably, MMO's couldn't even allow users to speak freely in chat, as they might mention something copyrighted, which would make the MMO companies themselves legally responsible, and capable of being knocked offline without trial at the first complaint. Sites like Wikipedia, which are based entirely on user content, probably couldn't operate at all due to the inherent dangers. The effects would be widespread and very chilling to how the internet operates.

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Having worked in the games industry for 15 years, I'm acutely aware of the financial damage done by online piracy. This thread is not the place to argue the virtues or moral pitfalls of pirated content.

That being said, these bills are deeply flawed. They were written by major copyright holders (the recording and movie industries) to give them carte blanche ultimate authority over the internet. They comprise a massive overreach, and our elected representatives (who are too old to even understand how VCRs work, let alone the web) are too clueless to realize what's actually in them.

If you have a second, please sign one of the (many) online petitions in protest of SOPA and PIPA, and/or contact your representative or senator and urge them to oppose the bills. This is not a Democrat or Republican thing -- both parties have been equally supportive of the bills and both parties are responsible.

The massive outpouring of opposition from tech companies has caused many people in Congress to change their minds, and the White House has also now expressed reservations about signing the bills in their current form. But the battle isn't done yet. The bills still live, and will still be brought up in the next Congressional session.

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Thanks for taking the time to read this.