Posts Tagged ‘SOPA’

Liberty leading the people, by Delacroix.

Photograph Wikimedia Commons

If there is one thing the Dutch deeply cherish it is freedom of speech. We like to speak our mind and don’t worry about being seen as utterly blunt by non-Dutch. It’s a right so dear to us that through history we have gone through great lengths to obtain and protect that right. Because  freedom of speech is the driving force behind social evolution. The possibility to ponder new thoughts aloud without fear of being burned at the stakes makes it possible to find new and better ways to live our lives. The problem is however, that any new thought is usually is some way insulting because it questions the status quo.

If everybody “knows” that the Earth is flat and the sun  and planets all circle around it, suggesting that in fact the Earth is round and that it revolves around the Sun along with the other planets challenges the status quo. It offends. Tell Galileo Galilei about it. The Church condemned his brilliant ideas, prohibited their publication, and sentenced Galileo to lifetime house arrest in 1633. And yet, Galileo was right. It took the Church 360 years to apologize and admit that Galileo was right after all.

Martin Luther run into trouble with the authorities as well, because he had a different view about the relationship between man and God. His ideas challenges about everything the power of the Church at that time was based on. His ideas were seen as highly offensive and he was banned by the Church. However, today his ideas are much appreciated by a large worldwide Protestant community.

The suffragettes dared to speak out loud about the right to vote for women. They were ridiculed at first, but as their ideas took hold among women in society they were imprisoned. Fierce action was taken to make them shut up, literally. Why? Because their ideas were offensive to men. It was though to be ridiculous and dangerous for women to pretend being as smart as men. Some women even died for the cause. And yet, because they spoke out, women can now vote, work and do all those things their great-grandmothers could not.

These are just a few examples of how ideas that were thought to be offensive at first, changed our society in positive ways, made us move forward as mankind. Censorship puts social evolution on hold or even shuts it down. We may not always like to hear about ideas that very much do not coincide with our own. Nevertheless, as a society we need them. We need these new ideas, we need to discuss them out and aloud, where everybody can hear them and freely put them against their own judgment. That is why we need freedom of speech and that is why we need to cherish it.

Today many websites are going black to protest against the so-called SOPA/PIPA act that many fear will give the American Authorities far too much power to block content on the Internet. Although Internet piracy needs to be addressed, giving the State the power to play censor is probably the worst way to accomplish that. Taking sites off line will not stop piracy, but it does pave the way to censor the Internet to stop free voices that are considered inconveniently offensive to certain groups. Shutting these voices down will eventually do more damage than letting them debate out in the open. So history learns us.

On a more day-to-day basis if this bill passes the following could happen:

I always take a picture from Wikimedia to illustrate this blog, since these are copyright free images. Now if something went wrong and somebody accidentally (or intentionally) posted copyrighted material on Wikimedia whitout saying it is, and I would include that copyrighted material into this newsletter by accident, theoretically my website could get blocked, as would my business PayPal account. This would mean the end of my business since most of my readers and clients are based in the United States. The really scary thing is that they could have me blocked without ever setting foot in a court room. All the copyright owner has to do is write a letter and prove I linked to their material without paying for it. This gives room for very nasty practices to get foreign competition shut down with a little bit of creativity.

So if you are an American reading this consider to speak out against this bill so they can come up with a better, more effective and more just way to fight Internet piracy. You can do so at: http://americancensorship.org/. If you support this bill, take no offense by me worrying about it. I’m just speaking my mind and do respect you speaking yours ;o).