Governmental Prevention of Piracy

            Piracy has a devastating effect on the American economy. There is not an exact amount of money associated to the loss; however, the estimated cost of piracy on the U.S. economy is roughly $100 billion annually. The U.S. Government has been trying to find a way to reduce the amount of pirated items online. People pirate music, movies, software, books, and intellectual property.

            In order to prevent people from pirating the government is looking to enforce the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). This is act is designed to crack down on websites based offshore that peddle illegal content. However, the argument is that the SOPA will entitle the government and copyright holders to too much control over the Web. In some cases it could order an Internet service provider like Verizon to cut off access to a site, or a search engine like Google could be told to delete links to an infringing site.

The U.S. Government states the SOPA will enforce:

·         It’ll stop illegal foreign websites from stealing and selling America’s technology and inventions, and keeping the profits for themselves.

·         It is NOT censorship of legal actions online, only activity which is already illegal.

·         It does not threaten the Internet as a tool of communications or commerce.

·         It will help to put money back into America’s economy and helps to rebuild the jobs that were loss due to piracy.

The SOPA act got a lot of attention from Google, Wikipedia, WordPress, Mozilla and many more companies that do not want the SOPA to be enforced. Could you imagine a world without Wikipedia? How would we write our papers anymore! How do you feel SOPA would be beneficial and in which ways would be harmful?

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