As Wikipedia goes on strike to protest the proposed ‘Stop Online Piracy Act' (SOPA) currently before the US Congress, the Greens have called on the Australian Government to take a stand in defence of Australian internet users and protect the viability of the medium.
Australian Greens communications spokesperson Senator Scott Ludlam pointed to the global blackout of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia as an example of the depth of the campaign to prevent the bill from becoming law.
"Has the Australian Government made any representation whatsoever to the US Government on this issue? Do they recognise that there will be little purpose in investing tens of billions of dollars in the NBN if the US copyright industry cripples the medium itself?
"As an example of breathtaking overreach by US copyright interests, the SOPA proposal and its cousin PIPA are hard to beat. The bills will institutionalise far-reaching, unaccountable censorship in order to protect the commercial interests of a handful of powerful media companies. The bills risk the broad-scale criminalisation of filesharing, the decimation of the open source community and tactical use of financial blockades against commercial competitors or non-commercial sites.
"SOPA would block entire non-US websites in the United States as a response to select infringing material. This includes Australian sites, and the online operations of Australian businesses.
"Under SOPA, US courts could bar online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with allegedly infringing websites, bar search engines from linking to such sites, and require internet service providers to block access to such sites."
Senator Ludlam said the bill would introduce extreme penalties for the unauthorised streaming copyrighted content.
"The bill makes unauthorised streaming of copyrighted content a criminal offence, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for ten such infringements within six months."