SOPA

Late last year- that is, October of 2011- a bill was introduced to Congress that would effectively eradicate online piracy and digital copyright infringement. The bill was known as SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and was designed to help copyright holders protect their properties by enabling them to seek legal action against any websites that are "facilitating copyright infringement." This means that websites that host unauthorized use of copyrighted materials would be liable to be sued and/or shut down by the owners of those copyrights. Unfortunately for many, this legislation would have directly affected websites such as Youtube and Imgur, which freely host videos and images uploaded by millions of users. Websites like these would have been liable for every single piece of copyrighted material uploaded by their users, meaning that, when this bill passed, Youtube could have been immediately sued for its hosting of this adorable clip from UP. As a result of SOPA, media-hosting websites like Youtube and Imgur would thus have to have started censoring user-uploaded content and limiting the ability of their users to freely share and access the media on their sites. This is still not as bad, though, as the effect this bill would have on social networking websites. Places like Facebook and Twitter would no longer be free spaces for sharing information and media, as if any one of their hundreds of millions of users chose to share a single piece of copyrighted material, they could be shut down. A good analogy I heard for the affect of this bill is that if a customer at a bank chose to store something he/she had stolen from someone else inside a safe deposit box at the bank, the bank could be sued or shut down by the owner of the stolen material. Clearly, the bank in this situation should not be at fault for this, nor should it be considered to be enabling theft. It just seems ridiculous to me, and the result would be that Facebook and Twitter would have to start strictly censoring the content uploaded by its users or be prepared to face legal action for it. Of course, for these websites, that would severely affect their ability to serve their only purpose, which is to allow people to freely share information. In this sense, SOPA could have rendered Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and essentially every other social networking website defunct.

At this point, you may be thinking "Boy, this sound terrible! I'm sure glad this bill never made it past congress!" Or you may not be thinking that. Assuming, though, that you're thinking that, I've got quite a surprise for you. The bill is still up for a vote, and the topic is still being debated hotly in congress. In fact, frighteningly enough, there is a significant chance that this bill could be passed when the house judiciary committee reconvenes to discuss it later this month. Fortunately, legions of online rights activists and web afficionados have come together to lobby against the bill, creating various online petitions (including an official whitehouse.gov petition which managed to garner the site's required 25,000 signatures in a matter of two days) and generally making it abundantly clear that a large number of people are not happy about SOPA. As you can probably already tell, I believe that this bill has clear, negative affects on our first amendment rights and I am all for quashing this thing as soon as possible. I'd love to hear what you think, though. Does this bill go too far, or is it important in the fight against online piracy? Feel free to leave a comment below.

No Hope for the Unseen

Yesterday in class, we touched upon the idea that socioeconomic status has a much greater effect on quality of education than it should in our country. Mr. O'Connor recited a statement he'd heard from a lower-class student who, despite his excellence in academics, showed no motivation or urgency in pursuing a higher education because, as he said, "my people aren't college people." It is obvious that, as Americans, none of us should be born exempt from an education, yet this student felt that the type of life he was born into did not accommodate aspirations of higher education, regardless of how well he had done for himself academically.
The first thing that came to my mind after hearing this was the story of Brown graduate Cedric Jennings, a man whose story was chronicled in Ron Suskind's A Hope in the Unseen. In the book, Suskind follows Jennings for several years during his academic carreer, detailing his exceedingly uphill battle to reach the Ivy League and his even more uphill battle to excel once there. Suskind goes to great lengths here to expose the extreme difficulty Jennings had excelling at his High School in inner-city Washington D.C, where he was one of very few students who had a GPA over 3.0 despite the fact that passing grades were given to students for merely showing up to classes. Jennings studied for hours before school, during his lunch, and after school in order to reach a grade merely comparable to that of students in much more economically exclusive High Schools, yet he was denied admission to MIT, the school he had been working for hundreds of extra hours to get into, and barely got into Brown University instead. Once at Brown, he found that his studies in High school in D.C did very little to prepare him for his college courses and that he could not relate to either the white students or the black students whom he learns with.
Hot on the heels of our civil liberties unit, what is clear from this book and from our discussion in class is that equal opportunity is by no means afforded to people of lower socioeconomic status in this country. The American lower-class is, for the most part, given significantly fewer opportunities than the middle and upper-classes, and, as such, has a far smaller possibility of success. While this is a topic that I could not possibly do justice to here and now, I believe it is important to compare Cedric Jennings' odyssey to the Ivy League and that of the ambitious students here at New Trier.

Ballou Senior High School, where Cedric Jennings graduated in 1995

At New Trier, academic excellence is the norm and the expectation of many parents, as well as the expectation of many students for themselves. As of last year, less than one percent of all New Trier students took all 2-level courses, which are the national average standard of college preparatory class. This means that more than ninety-nine percent of the student body here at New Trier took at least one 3-level class, which are considered accelerated courses by national standards. Comparatively - and while these statistics don't directly correlate since many schools do not employ subject levels like New Trier does - in Jennings' high school, a mere six percent of students received a grade average of a B or above. New Trier students are also expected to participate in some of the many extracurricular activities the school offers, with over seventy-seven percent of all students participating in at least one extracurricular, not counting intramurals. Meanwhile, the dropout rate at Jennings' school was over ten percent and few students participated in athletics due to the school's 2.0 GPA requirement for participation. Clearly, the standards here at New Trier are far greater than they were at Cedric Jennings' school during his enrollment, and it is no mere coincidence that New Trier township is also far wealthier than the suburb of Washington D.C. in which Jennings lived.
Hopefully, during your day at school you will think about how fortunate we are to have the opportunities that our school offers us and why those opportunities exist for us. Also, if you have any thoughts on this admittedly dense topic, please feel free to share in the comment section below.

The Death of the Newspaper - The Death of News?

The Rocky Mountain News headquarters being torn down

Whenever my parents ask me "what do you want to be when you grow up?" or, as it's been phrased more recently to account for my insistence that I'm plenty grown up, "what do you want to do when you're done with school?" I reply that being a journalist seems like a nice job. To this, I almost always get a reply along the lines of: "well, that profession is dying off now." With the ludicrously rapid proliferation of internet use across the world and the fact that the cable television is now not only an American staple but a perceived necessity, more and more people are choosing instant, passive methods of consuming news over reading a daily or weekly newspaper. While I won't delve into every reason why cable and online news are beating out the newspaper, the "death of the newspaper" (as chronicled here) is changing the news landscape in very interesting ways. To many, the local newspaper is the most reliable source of unbiased news that covers a broad range of topics. However, with the newspaper being slowly phased out of existence, the types of news people have available to them is becoming limited. Sure, there are enough cable news giants to provide viewers with all the news that matters to them, but when even the network touting itself as "fair and balanced" has a whole Wikipedia article about its various controversial biases, it is clear that the discerning news seeker need look elsewhere. As for online news outlets, it seems the only options are highly departmentalized sources or highly unreliable ones. An example of a news outlet that falls under both categories is the popular perezhilton.com, a self-titled "Hollywood gossip blog" where every article is written by one person. For those who prefer their news not to be considered "gossip," it is still difficult to find an outlet that publishes news of all topics. While sources like CNET and Deadspin are most certainly reliable, they both focus on one facet of the news industry - technology and sports, respectively. The only online news outlets to deliver general, reliable information are the online departments of newspapers, ironically enough, though this is a news medium that has turned out to be much less profitable than its paper-and-ink counterpart was (after all, looking at an article online is free). This leaves news corporations like the New York Times forced to downsize or find a way to thicken the online revenue stream. Since the former is much easier than the latter, it seems as if the death of the newspaper is now becoming the death of news as we know it, a fact which I personally find a little bit frightening. What do you think? Where do you get the majority of your news from? How are you feeling today? Would you like a sandwich? Leave a comment below.