As college students who rely on Wikipedia for everything, not to mention the talk on Facebook, pretty much everyone knows that Wikipedia blacked out for 24 hours this past Wednesday in protest of SOPA/PIPA. These bills were meant to stop foreign websites from posting content that infringes on copyrights, but instead, they could be detrimental to today’s internet. If these bills are passed, what does it really mean?
— Obviously no more illegally downloaded videos and music. But even more than that, Google and other websites could get in trouble for showing those illegal websites in search results. This means that in censoring the illegal websites, many legal websites could get shut down and censored simply for having the wrong words up or being suspected of copyright infringement.
— Sites like YouTube will have to censor their content much more heavily. If not, they could potentially face being shut down. This means that all of those cover songs that entertain us in our daily lives would be removed. Think “Disturbia,” Sophia Grace and her “Super Bass” rendition, and even Justin Bieber’s cover of “With You” that got him discovered. As far as YouTube goes, this also means that all of the “lyric” versions of songs or parody videos (think stick figures drawn to Afroman’s “Because I got high”) would be removed as well.
— If that did not scare you enough, SOPA/PIPA could also affect bloggers and what they post. If a blogger posts a link to a video or a logo on their blog and it infringes on a copyright, they could be shut down. A blog would also be held accountable for not only what they post, but what others post in comments. In real terms, under SOPA/PIPA, if I were to post links to our favorite viral YouTube videos that would be censored, HerCampus could be at risk of getting shut down.