By Jordan Lofgren
Staff Writer
After months of protesting against SOPA and PIPA (the internet-filtering bills that have been killed off), two new bills have risen in response. One bill that has been made up is the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. The other is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which is a worldwide plurilateral agreement amongst dozens of nations to combat piracy. While we should be for protecting children from pornography and against piracy, these bills do almost nothing that their names infer.
After the losses of SOPA and PIPA, Republican Lamar Smith, from Texas, has authored a new bill under the alluring name of the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act. This bill’s main point is that it would force Internet Service Providers (ISP) to keep track of user information for 18 months. This would include your bank account numbers, credit card numbers, mailing addresses, and phone records. But what surprises me the most is that this lawmaker doesn’t understand the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution which clearly states the following: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”
As unconstitutional as it is, it could very well pass. After all, the Patriot Act and more recently the National Defense Authorization Act both have been signed into law while being unconstitutional.
The more well-known Internet censorship bill that is being protested worldwide is ACTA. Finalized in 2010, it was negotiated and signed secretly among 29 different nations, including the United States, Canada, Japan, and the UK. The bill’s main focus is to protect intellectual property internationally. It also highlights the use of trademarks and ideas without permission, putting anybody at risk for doing something as simple as posting the lyrics of a song or showing somebody a picture that you didn’t create. To track this, ISPs would be forced to monitor the online activity of their users to make sure they do not visit any site which could host copyrighted content. This means that sites driven by user-created content (YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter) could lose a majority of users because of a simple infraction. The best real-world analogy I’ve heard to this part of the bill was uploaded onto YouTube by the user 1TheRevolutionIsNow: “Imagine you pay to take a cooking course and learn how to make a great meal. You go home and make it for your wife, who enjoys it and asks how to make it. If you teach her how to make the meal, you both, under ACTA, are criminals who would be placed in prison for sharing the information that only one of you paid for to learn.”
Although the agreement has been signed already, it will not be able to be made law until June; it first needs to be ratified by the European Parliament, and as of this moment, they are against the bill. A lot can happen in a few months. The media-publishing companies RIAA and MPAA, who lobbied for the passing of SOPA and PIPA, could lobby even more for this bill. But we can protest and hopefully gain more ground on getting “big brother” off of our backs and doing what they can to protect our freedoms.
