What Artists and Creators think about SOPA…

The topic on everyone’s lips this week – the on-going online piracy saga with SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act). Many internet sites, including Wikipedia, Mozilla and WordPress, showed their protest against this by having a blackout on Wednesday which stopped users being able to see the contents on their website.

The anti-SOPA protest counts actors, authors and musicians among its supporters, and even US President Obama has said that he would not support SOPA. According to Hypebot, the following points were made in an open letter addressed to Washington posted on 17th January, from the point of view of a collective of artists and creators which includes Trent Reznor, MGMT and OK Go among the list of names:

• They mention their gratitude for the measures put into place by policymakers, to help protect their works from copyright infringement
• They highlight the importance of social media in reaching and communicating with their fans, and the “benefits of a free and open Internet”
• They voice their worry that artists and creators will be censored and legitimate services and websites blocked under PIPA and SOPA’s new powers, even though they themselves are legitimate users

It seems as though the takedown of sites has already begun, with sites Megaupload and Megavideo being closed down on Thursday. According to Tech Digest, the US government’s reasoning for this was that they considered the webmasters of the sites to be involved in a “Mega Conspiracy, a worldwide criminal organization whose members engaged in criminal copyright infringement and money laundering on a massive scale.” The Telegraph reported that the operators of Megaupload were accused of ignoring requests to remove pirated material from music and film firms, and charged with criminal copyright infringement. According to the BBC, the site has been accused of costing copyright holders over $500m in lost revenue, in an accusation by federal prosecutors.

In response, internet hacking collective Anonymous launched a DDos (distributed denial-of-service) attack on a list high profile websites, including the websites of the US Department of Justice, the FBI, Universal Music and the Motion Picture Association of America. According to Tech Digest, it is thought that each organisation linked to the targeted sites have supported the anti-piracy bills in the past. Anonymous later tweeted:

They have also since uploaded a map showing the current number of network attacks by geographic region.

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