Why should you be interested in being against the Stop Online Piracy Act? Well, there is a list of reasons why, but right now were just going to focus on one crucial point; it violates our rights as citizens of the United States under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Just to refresh some of you readers, the First Amendment states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” according to Law Cornell The First Amendment. In laymen’s terms, its violates our rights in terms of free speech on the Internet, therefore putting users of any social media sites and such under censorship and potentially infringed upon the whole.  Below are a few critical points as to how SOPA directly violates the First Amendment as states in the article Would Sopa & Pipa Violate the First Amendment?

  • The Acts amount to impermissible “prior restraint” of speech, because they allow private parties to suppress speech without a judicial hearing and due process of law.
  • The definition of a website “dedicated to the theft of US property” is impermissibly vague, and allows copyright owners to target entire sites when only a small portion of them contains infringing material.
  • The burden placed on websites to police their own content, under threat of strict liability for infringing content found there, will chill their exercise of free speech rights.
  • The sweeping remedies authorized by the Acts are so broad that they will inevitably affect “large swaths” of legitimate speech as well.
  • The Acts authorize the US Attorney General to blacklist sites suspected of infringement, under a process that is unlikely to ever afford most sites a realistic chance of defending themselves.  US citizens would then be deprived of information that they have a First Amendment right to access.

To quickly summarize those points, SOPA allows for the government to easily blacklist a website under its broad terms that are thought to contain any information thought to “belong” to the United States. This gives government access to censorship any website thought to have such content and be easily removed. The First Amendment alone is argument enough that SOPA cannot be validated.

Also, according to Harvard Law Professor Larry Trive in How Sopa Violates the First Amendment, “the notice-and-termination procedure of Section 103(a) runs afoul of the “prior restraint” doctrine, because it delegates to a private party the power to suppress speech without prior notice and a judicial hearing. This provision of the bill would give complaining parties the power to stop online advertisers and credit card processors from doing business with a website, merely by filing a unilateral notice accusing the site of being “dedicated to theft of U.S. property” – even if no court has actually found any infringement.” All in all, the First Amendment isn’t even taken into consideration. An entire website is able to be banned based on what is being advertised (that’s our free speech).

For my last point in accordance to the First Amendment and living in the United States, we can sometimes take that for granted. But here in America, land of the free, we pride ourselves on our rights. Now, lets focus of Communistic China where censorship of the Internet is already in place. In a New York Times article, Internet Censorship in China, “The [Chinese] government’s computers intercept incoming data and compare it against an ever-changing list of banned keywords or Web sites, screening out even more information. The motive is often obvious: Since late 2010, the censors have prevented Google searches of the English word “freedom.” If we allow SOPA, we allow ourselves in America to be censored. We do not know the limits that the government could implement, but why even give them the chance.

The fact that we are able to create this blog, write our own posts, be able to speak at free will is all justified in the First Amendment of the Constitution. Stop SOPA.


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