I just recently signed onto the anti-SOPA site that MSPA redirects to, after realizing that I don’t want to be one of those people that didn’t do anything on the extremely off chance that the bill goes through.  I think I should share my thoughts on it.

If you’re reading this post, you probably already know what SOPA is since this blog is obscure and SOPA is the biggest issue on the internet right now, so I won’t go into detail on the standard explanation.  In short it takes the legal aspect of copyright to unfathomable levels, so much as an outsider’s post on your site, linking to a site that  has copyrighted material that it shouldn’t have, is proper justification for taking down your site (or blocking it if you’re international) without allowing you to take up the issue with whatever government agency will be made to handle it.  But that’s not the only major issue with it.

A heavily recurring theme in media for decades is the expansion of government and the consequences of that.  If you haven’t read 1984 by George Orwell, read it.  Also read Animal Farm, by the same author.  1984 is about a fictional scenario of a government in control to the point where they can even influence thought and language.  Animal Farm is a communism scenario mirroring the history of the USSR, using animals as counterparts to different figures and populaces.

Now I’m not saying that the US government is communist, but many principles of expanding power like in Animal Farm are similar, and the end result to unchecked expansion could end up leading to a situation similar to what’s portrayed in 1984.  I’m write this from a politically neutral standpoint for the purpose of this post, so bear with me even if you disagree with some aspects.

Government expansion is a prevalent issue, and if a bill came up that were to, for sake of the example, allow the government to withdraw as much money as they want from any private business without justification, that bill would be struck down swiftly as it would be far too large of a shift of governmental practice for us to accept.  The majority of the population would notice such a large change and identify it for what it is, a major power grab.  Now if over a decade several bills that increased the power the government had over taxation, namely the process behind changing it, were put up, those shifts would still be noticed, but it would garner less resistance and possibly more support from whichever political party presented it.  The expanded timeframe and small increments of change would eventually add up to the effect of the first example, but it would be considered normal as the populace would see each change too small to worry about, and mirrors the concept in Animal Farm where small changes led to easily gaining massive control over time.  At this point if people catch on to the fact that the government can steal from anyone without cause, they won’t be able to organize and resist as easily as any support for the movement could be drained of their funding and left with too little resources to resist.

You might be asking, “But that’s not SOPA?  What does this example that have to do with it?” and here’s where SOPA falls into that analogy.  SOPA is a middle-sized step between the large bill and the many small bills, as government infringement on the internet has grown.  It’s supposed to be a quick final leap to the point of taking government control too far.  Fortunately, this change is too large to go unnoticed, and hence why sites all over the internet are protesting.  Now you may argue that SOPA isn’t the farthest that the government can take control, and that is very true.  SOPA is the “point of no return” where the protests are crippled and resistance to government control of the internet is almost irreparably mitigated.  With SOPA in effect, the government has the ability to prevent US access to any foreign site and to take down any US-hosted site without the site owner to have any say in it, which is currently “intended” to be on the justification of copyright infringement.  While this may conflict with the First Amendment, shifts against that have been made too.

The point is that if this bill goes through, the government will be able to control the flow of information on the internet within the US.  Subsequent bills that will inevitably follow SOPA will be able to slip thorugh almost unnoticed, and if it is noticed the means of organizing protest and resistance will be reduced, as not having a social networking site (which SOPA could remove if there’s as much as a link to copyrighted material) makes it harder to rapidly spread the word.  This would also open the government to make bigger steps in control in other aspects of the world, including economy, military and even rewriting the constitution, eventually leading to a similar setting as in the novel 1984, in terms of government power and civil rights.

But what happens if SOPA doesn’t pass?  Say that it’s struck down before it even reaches the President and all supporters have their reputations destroyed.  Is everything better?  I believe it’s inevitable for SOPA to revive again, but with a different name, different wording and new supporters.  It could easily be a smaller step, so as to be harder to notice and to make it easier to avoid the current response to SOPA.  And that’s what we have to watch out for in the future.  Will you care enough to look for the small changes?