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The Anti Piracy Act

Her Campus Placeholder Avatar Valerie Hasson
Her Campus Placeholder Avatar Madeline Hunt
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at UCLA chapter.

You may have noticed last Wednesday that if you tried to gather information using the Wikipedia web site, the effort was fruitless because the website was shutdown.  In a dramatic protest of two bills currently in Congress that were interpreted as affecting free speech, Wikipedia and Reddit blacked out their site for a twenty-four hour period, which they hoped would raise public awareness. 

The Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) was introduced into the House of Representatives in October.  The Protect Internet Protocol Act (PIPA) was approved by a Senate committee in May and scheduled for a vote on January 24th of this year.  The bills were aimed at battling piracy and targeting crooked overseas sites that had servers located in Sweden.  In order to attain this lofty goal, “U.S. search engines, advertising networks and other providers” would be legally required to withhold their services from reaching these servers.  Companies like PayPal would not be able to transmit funds and companies like Google searches could not show flagged sites.  Outside parties would be able to notify U.S. companies if a customer was suspected of being a site practicing piracy and then the U.S. network would have to stop any services to the suspect company within a period of five days.  The suspect company would have to prove its innocence and bear the legal cost of doing so in order to get services reinstated.
Tech Companies like Google and Facebook complained to lawmakers in November that while they supported the goal of antipiracy, the current bills would lead tech companies to practice censorship.  Next, Wikipedia and Reddit blacked out their sites while protesters appeared on the streets in Washington, D.C., Seattle, San Francisco and New York, and Google generated a petition that was signed by greater than seven million people.  As a result of the powerful actions of tech companies and supporters, both the SOPA and PIPA bill were tabled on January 20th.
 
http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/17/technology/sopa_explained/index.htm
http://www.marchpr.com/blog/2012/01/wikipedia/

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Madeline Hunt is a senior at UCLA majoring in Communication Studies with a minor in Spanish. Originally from the laidback beach-town of Santa Barbara, the California native finds the fast-paced nature and eccentricity of LA extremely exciting. Once more, she decided to expand her horizons when she studied abroad this past fall in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Madeline wants to pursue a career in the entertainment industry and is considering broadcast journalism and public relations as potential options. On campus, she is currently the Public Relations & Marketing Director for the student- run organization Fashion and Student Trends and an intern at E! News. She served as an entertainment reporter on UCLA’s accredited student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, under the video division and is a current member of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. During her free time, she enjoys playing tennis, exercising, going to the beach, shopping (online shopping will be the death of her!), reading Glamour and Cosmo, eating Mexican food and sushi, spending time with her friends, practicing her Spanish, and satisfying her weakness for caffeine with Starbuck’s lattes.