SOPA Can Impact Companies Who Think They're Immune

Copyright

from the not-so-simple dept

SpiderOak is an online backup/syncing/storage platform. If you’re familiar with Dropbox, it’s quite similar to that. In fact, when Dropbox ran into some very public challenges concerning its privacy setup as well as how it handles government requests, one of the “alternatives” we heard about a lot was SpiderOak. I haven’t used it myself, but a lot of folks I know and trust suggest that it’s a good product, with really strong security and privacy rules. The company recently sent out an email to its users, which (in part) discusses SOPA:

What is SOPA? This act allows content owners – movie companies, music labels, etc. – to obtain court orders requiring search providers such as Google to filter their search results to exclude websites that host allegedly infringing material, and requiring the net registrars to block DNS servers from providing the correct IP address for such sites. The act also makes site owners civilly liable for the availability of copyright material on their sites. In addition, it makes the posting of a link to a third party website that has copyright material on it the same as hosting the material on your own site.

What does this mean for SpiderOak users if this act passes? You don’t have to worry. Our level of encryption means not even your filenames, file sizes or file types are readable.

They also include a link to the American Censorship site. That’s all cool, and it’s certainly reassuring that their encryption keeps things secret… but in saying that you don’t have to worry about it, it seems like SpiderOak actually just put a huge target on themselves. After all, SOPA has a big fat anti-circumvention clause, which specifically includes calling out products that are “marketed for the circumvention or bypassing of measures” in the bill. SpiderOak may have run afoul of that by “marketing” its product as immune to SOPA because of encryption (a circumvention tool).

This is, obviously, not to question SpiderOak at all, but rather to point out just how ridiculous the anti-circumvention clause is. Obviously there are tremendously good reasons why we all should want services like SpiderOak, with their high levels of encryption. But just the fact that it advertises that shouldn’t be cause to get it in trouble under the law.

And the larger point is that even companies who think they’re immune to SOPA may discover otherwise, thanks to the way the bill actually works.

Filed Under: impact, protect ip, sopa
Companies: spideroak