No More SOPA detects when a product has ties to the Stop Online Piracy Act. (Click to enlarge.)
Corporate lobbyists be warned. Push a bill like the Stop Online Piracy Act that threatens broad restrictions on the tech industry, and you’ll face some very clever coders focusing all their innovation on fighting back. The latest example: a tool that makes identifying and boycotting SOPA-supporting companies as easy as a tap on your smartphone.
No More SOPA, a free Android application developed by a group of students at the University of British Columbia, allows users to scan any product’s barcode and determine if it was made by a company that officially supports SOPA, or even a parent company or subsidiary of a SOPA supporter. The app, which requires downloading the free app Barcode Scanner, uses a public UPC database to find a product’s manufacturer, then queries a remote server to compare the manufacturer with a list of 800 firms with lobbying ties to the bill.
Chris Thompson, one of the students who created No More SOPA, says he hopes the program could help solidify the widespread anger around SOPA, which aims to block access to foreign copyright-infringing websites, into well-defined boycotts of the companies who have pushed the bill, from Adidas to Xerox to Walmart to Dow Chemical. “These companies think they’ll make more money with SOPA than without it,” says 20-year old Thompson. “If they realize they’re costing themselves more consumers than they’ll gain, they’ll be less inclined to go forward with that support.”
The app compares products with a list of more than 800 companies’ ties to the bill. (Click to enlarge.)
Thompson says he recently scanned a Simply Orange bottle of orange juice he had bought, for instance, and the app detected that the juice had ties to SOPA: Coca-Cola, which owns the brand, is owned by Nestle, which also owns L’Oreal, a company that’s lobbied for SOPA. He’s since switched to Tropicana.
Though No More SOPA is still being tweaked–Thompson admits it currently can’t give a definitive answer to whether about 40% of products have SOPA ties–it’s already been downloaded more than 2,000 times since it hit the Android market late last week, and Thompson says that rate is quickly accelerating. The next upgrade to the app, he says, will tell the user the exact relationship the product has to a SOPA supporting firm, and future versions will allow the user to check on a company’s stance on a wide range of issues, not just SOPA.
As a Senate hearing on SOPA looms later this month, hackers and engineers have been busy building tools to cripple or defeat the bill, which many see as imposing widespread censorship on the Internet as well as potentially holding back advances in security. DeSOPA, a Firefox plug-in, is designed to circumvent DNS filtering, one of the proposed methods SOPA would use to block access to foreign sites accused of infringing copyright. But since the successful boycott of GoDaddy flipped the company’s support for the bill to opposition in late December, SOPA haters have largely been focusing on boycotts to resist the bill. No SOPA, an add-on for Google’s Chrome browser, tells users when they’re visiting a website of a company that supports SOPA, and invites them to write a letter or boycott the firm.
Given that Thompson is Canadian, he says other ways of fighting SOPA like voting or writing a letter to a Senator aren’t available to him. “But this is going to destroy the entire tech industry as we know it, so it will affect us too,” he says. “So we’re doing what we can.”
Download No More SOPA to your Android phone here.
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