Wikipedia joins anti-piracy wrangle
Wikipedia has blacked out its English language pages for 24 hours in protest at two mooted US anti-piracy laws, SOPA and PIPA. The media and entertainment industry has welcomed the bills, but the internet world is outraged at what it sees as a dangerous restriction of internet freedom.
Companies like social news site Reddit and software firm Mozilla have joined the protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate.
The bills aim to crack down on foreign websites that supply counterfeit goods or flout copyright on music, films or books. US internet providers and search engines would be obliged by law to block such websites. Advertisers and online payment systems like PayPal doing business with “rogue sites” would face prosecution.
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Supporters
SOPA and PIPA would protect the US media and entertainment industry, the sector claims. The acts are in line with existing legislation directed at individual downloaders, says Tim Kuik, head of Dutch anti-piracy organisation Brein. But he can understand the consternation.
“What strikes me about the discussion is that America is a country where the users of illegal sites have been held responsible for quite some time. This is linked to the fact that there is resistance to holding the sites themselves responsible. This is different in the Netherlands, where we hold the sites responsible rather than the users.”
Security
SOPA ran into an obstacle at the weekend. The bill has been withdrawn pending an investigation into security. The lawmakers had never even given it a thought, says expert and hacker Daniel Kaminsky.
Mr Kaminsky was the key figure behind the DNSSEC security system. In 2008 he demonstrated that DNS servers, the telephone directories of the internet, could be manipulated. DNSSEC ensures a safe link between the website’s URL and the IP number. To put it simply, it checks the digital signature that guarantees authenticity – particularly handy for sensitive sites like an online bank.
Spectacularly bad idea
The problem is that you can’t scrap illegal entries in the directories without endangering the others, the hacker says.
“I’m sympathetic to the fact that there is a desire to be able to lie about where these systems are. But there is a conflict. I have a large number of legitimate systems out there that I really need to know the truth about. I’ve got some other systems that people want to lie about. Unfortunately, DNSSEC makes it one or the other. In order for me to know the truth about the real people, I unfortunately need to know the truth about the others as well."
“We have a technological mandate that encourages people to have less safe internet access. That’s scary. The fact that untrusted entities are going to have control not just over finding the [IP] numbers for pirate sites but finding the numbers for banks? What a spectacularly bad idea.”
Google and Mozilla
There are other reasons for the broad protest. Software companies Google and Mozilla argue that SOPA and PIPA stand in the way of innovation and investment. In the long term, the jobs lost will outweigh the ones created in the entertainment industry.
Now the House of Representatives has put SOPA on hold, opponents hope the Senate will follow suit with PIPA. The bill is up for debate this month.