On January 18th, Reddit.com will go dark for a day! I repeat, January 18th, reddit will go dark. Why? To voice the website’s opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being debated in the House. Many a “redditor” will find themselves with nothing to do all day but, gasp, work. Productivity will boom, memes will drastically wane, bacon sales will rise, and an adopt a narwhal association could be formed-- the world will go on without a noticeable difference to most people.
Reddit is an online community that creates, links, and copies content on the internet. SOPA could be the end of the community. The current language in SOPA would make streaming copyrighted protected content a felony and more importantly could censor websites that used copyright infringing content—via de-indexing from search engines, blocking through internet service providers, and stopping payments to website owners.
Websites like Reddit rely on its users to create and link to content. With this reliance, much of the content on the website infringes copyright. When something becomes popular on Reddit, a website will get a huge surge in traffic—sometimes so much that it takes the website down. This would ideally be good for the content authors—making Reddit’s front page would create more traffic and hopefully lead to ad revenue. Unfortunately much of the content on Reddit is copied to third party sites like imgur.com. This means that Reddit and Imgur make advertising money while the content creator is only left with the satisfaction of creating something popular. This is obviously unfair.
"But what power does a relatively small player like Reddit really have? Apparently more than most would think."
What SOPA attempts to do is remedy the massive copyright infringement prevalent on the internet. By raising the penalties of copyright infringement, the onus will be flipped to website operators to police content--otherwise their website could literally be effectively wiped of the internet. Websites like Reddit argue this protection is going too far. It will create a system that allows for massive censorship and kill the freedom of information that has made the internet such a paradigm shift.
But what power does a relatively small player like Reddit really have? Apparently more than most would think. Recently, Webhosting company GoDaddy.com supported SOPA and Reddit took notice. By pointing out GoDaddy’s support, Reddit urged many websites to move their website domains off GoDaddy in opposition. The resulting mass exodus of users led GoDaddy to reverse its support for SOPA. A clear showing of the strength of Reddit’s voice.
Reddit is not alone in hating SOPA and could be just one of many websites to go offline in opposition to the act. What could happen when other popular websites like Wikipedia also go dark in opposition to SOPA?. Will this create enough public backlash from users to call their congressman in opposition to the bill? Perhaps more importantly this is a signal for website owners to get serious about keeping copyrighted work off their sites voluntarily. Otherwise, an over reaching bill might do it for them.
Comments
Post new comment