As Wikipedia, Mozilla.org and other websites shut down on Wednesday in protest of the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP Acts, many Boston University students said they hoped the controversial bills are defeated.
The acts call for punishment of sites with material that infringes on copyright or intellectual property rights.
SOPA, a bill in the House of Representatives, would also require search engines and service providers to take “technically feasible and reasonable measures” to withhold such sites from their users.
The PIPA bill in the Senate would make sites “dedicated to infringing activities” cease and desist.
College of Arts and Sciences junior Sara Chaparro, a computer science major, said the acts would greatly affect the field of software programming.
“When you’re coding anything you get a lot of your inspiration and information from online from other coders,” Chaparro said. “So that would be inaccessible to anybody if you want to publish a piece of code that other people can use to actually make progress in their own projects. It would affect the field of software programming which affects technology, which affects everything.”
School of Management junior Dhruv Sharma said that the acts might block his reach and inspiration as an entrepreneur.
“It obviously affects you if any kind of access to information is omitted by any kind of movement because literally you need to network, you need to spread your ideas, you need to put up your information while being able to access others,” Sharma said.
If the acts pass, people should revolt, possibly setting up an underground Internet, he said.
“There’s no way they can block this,” Sharma said. “There’s no way they can stop you from having an Internet.”
CAS junior Sam Leone said he has an unpopular opinion on the acts because he worked for Senator Christopher Coons, one of the co-sponsors of PIPA, last summer.
Although some portions of the bill overreach, PIPA should pass it if America is serious about increasing its economic competitiveness, he said.
“One of the strengths that we have as a country is that we produce a lot of intellectual property to people – a lot of movies, a lot of music – that is our chief exports,” Leone said. “And if we are serious about maintaining that advantage industrially, then we need to really prevent piracy that’s going to infringe upon that.”
Leone said that he doesn’t think the acts are an infringement of free speech, and believed even if they don’t pass now they will come back.
“PIPA and SOPA are the current incarnation of bills that have been working their way through Congress for years,” he said, “and even it’s not passed before the election in November, these particular bills are not going to go away.”
Leone said he thinks the bills will end up being watered down and eventually Congress will pass something.
The Senate will vote on PIPA on Jan. 24 and the House will resume work on SOPA in February.
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