January 19-25, 2012, Current Events Lesson Plan
Current Event:
Congressional leaders have indefinitely postponed a vote on anti-piracy legislation just two days after major Internet companies and organizations staged an online protest against passage of the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House.
Objective:
Thousands of websites “went dark,”–that is, took themselves offline–on January 18 to protest the Internet anti-piracy legislation then being debated by Congress. This resulted in congressional leaders postponing a vote indefinitely. The Behind the Headlines news story and related World Book articles explains these two proposed bills along with the views of both those who support them and those who oppose them.
Vocabulary Terms:
- broadband
- censorship
- Congress
- copyright
- download
- free speech
- Internet
- legislation
- offline
- piracy
- protest
- website
Discussion Topics:
1. Thousands of Internet sites, including Google, “went dark”–that is, took themselves offline–for a day in protest. Do your students think this was a good idea? Why or why not? Do they think these sites caused themselves any harm in going offline? In what ways?
2. Copyright is a collection of rights granted to artists, authors, musicians, and other creators of original works. Copyright laws seek to ensure that creative people benefit from their own creations. Piracy is the illegal sharing or distributing of copyrighted material. Ask your students to first name something that is copyrighted (it could be a work of art, a song, a book, a video game, etc.). Then ask them how that work could be pirated and the negative effect that could have on its creator.
3. Critics of the proposed legislation felt that it would hamper growth, innovation, and investment and curtail the right of free speech. The constitutions of democratic countries guarantee citizens the right to express their opinions freely. Discuss how the concepts of free speech and censorship apply to material published or linked to on the Internet. Ask your students if they think removing websites that publish or link to copyrighted material could harm free speech.
4. The two bills were strongly supported by the Motion Picture Association of America and other media companies and strongly opposed by Google and other powerful Internet companies. Supporters claimed that online piracy–that is, the illegal sharing or distribution of copyrighted material–is rampant on the Internet and harms content producers’ ability to make profits. Critics charged that the bills would grant overly broad power to media companies and could enable censorship. Ask your students to verbalize which arguments they agree with and why.