I imagine most of you reading this have a blog or your own little website, a place where you’ve invested time and energy so as to carve out your own little corner of the web. You’ve probably bought your own domain name, or have a cool name on tumblr and you’re quite proud of it.

Imagine that you’re wrapping up the year and you’ve written a list of your favourite songs from the past year. Imagine then, that someone in the comments posts a link to one of those songs, where someone else can download it. Under the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (And Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act), you are liable for the content posted and, should anyone follow the link and download the song, your domain name can be seized and your site blocked from major search engines. All for one little comment. There’s a fantastic infographic at www.americancensorship.org/infographic.html that explains how this system works.

Now you might be wondering why I’m more than a little bit worried and more than a little bit upset about a bill that would seemingly only affect American web users. Think about how many different web services you use that reside in or were created in, the United States? Tumblr, where this piece was first published, is hosted in the US.

Under the provisions of this bill, if a single person posts an image to tumblr for which they do not hold the copyright, the entire tumblr site could be taken down.

In order to remove potential avenues for liabilities, Tumblr may remove the ability to post links and images altogether. Imagine Twitter without the millions of links and photos that go flying around each day. One single complaint could potentially lead to serious problems for web businesses.

And that’s just the thin edge of the wedge. The great start-ups like youtube, facebook and path could not exist if this odious bill had been passed — they’d be either bankrupt or only a boring fraction of what they are today, because they are places where people freely share content, ideas and links. Facebook is great not just because it has your “friends” on it, but because it’s a forum for sharing links, pictures and concepts with people. It’s a place where you can share the things that bring you joy. Imagine those sites if you couldn’t post photos, videos or links. Imagine how dull the internet would be if, simply to assuage the dying business model of a few immoral media companies, everything had to be vetted before it could be shared.

The reason this legislation is even more worrying is that it is a template, a beta test if you will, for the real thing, . A world wide ‘anti-counterfeiting’ treaty that is actually nothing less than internet censorship. There was quite an uproar from internet freedom advocates when the ACTA was signed in 2011, but the provisions in that agreement are a fraction of what will be pushed in future agreements if SOPA passes. You can guarantee the luddites in governments all over the world will gleefully sign away the greatest power of one of the greatest inventions of humankind if spoken to sweetly enough. So much unrealised potential will be quashed as inventors and creators shy away from the internet out of fear of prosecution or worse under the draconian provisions of the bill.

There is talk at the moment on some of the biggest websites (including Google, Facebook, Reddit, Youtube and even Pornhub) of having a worldwide blackout day in protest against SOPA. Each of those sites would be inaccessible for that day and would present information as to why they are inaccessible. Sure, it would inconvenience a fair few people, but what better way to draw the attention of several billion people to the fact that the internet, and the hard won freedoms we have on it, should not be subject to the grotesque, lovecraftian, crony, regulatory capture that has so entombed the main pillars of the ‘content creation’ industry. In a world where bits can be seamlessly replicated without loss, the concept of enforcing the ownership of a certain order of ones and zeroes requires as onerous a regulatory regime as we’re seeing in SOPA. Realistically, the regulatory regime of SOPA is the only way to preserve the business model and the current status quo of media companies. It is a truly cynical take on letting “A hundred flowers blossom”, protecting a dying species of tulip by burning all other plant life within a 100km radius.

The internet is the best communication medium we have. It is the pinnacle of so much talent and so much genius, standing shoulder upon shoulder. It is truly awe-inspiring that one of the greatest inventions of human creativity came directly out of the a need for a robust method of communication, one that was so far-fetched that, even to this day, its makeup is still poorly understood by so many people. To give those who claim to be the gatekeepers of true innovation and true creation carte blanche over what we, the denizens of the internet, can say and do and create, is selling short a triumph of humanity. So many words will go unwritten, so many thoughts will go unthought, so much joy will go unfelt. Those who see only the pseudo- anarchy of in the internet, rather than the relationships, connections, creativity, beauty and freedom that it enables each and every one of us, are the troglodytes of our time, missing out on the greatest period of history we have experienced so far. The internet, to those who wish to keep such a tight grip on the creativity of the human race that they risk asphyxiating it, is simply pearls before swine.

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Dan Nolan is from the internet. His tumblr is at http://phetdreams.tumblr.com and he is also on twitter @dannolan. He is probably Not Safe For Work.

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