A new bill is in the stages of becoming a law. Here are some hints about what it is. The acronym is SOPA, and it deals with the internet and censorship. No, it does not stand for “Stop Online Porn Act”. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) are new bills that have been pressed largely by the entertainment industry in effort to censor the internet with strict regulation and harsh punishment for copyright infringement. When I hear that the government is actually allowing these proposals to be debated, I think “oh great, turns our George Orwell was right … only 28 years off”, but I quickly get encouraged by the vast number of people who were willing to take action and do what they could to keep these bills from passing. Reddit was the first to go on strike and their actions created a social EMP. Soon after, hundreds if not thousands of websites went dark out of protest.
The web started out as a way to connect people to information. Around the turn of the century, it really became a way to connect people. Now, it’s almost not even a connection, but rather a venue that hosts a community. I am so happy to hear about members of this community taking their social responsibility so seriously! Granted, every community appreciates a police force, but NO community likes a curfew under martial law with without due process. Granted, Hollywood is losing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars a year because of piracy, but a bill like this would create losses in the billions for internet companies. The bad FAR outweighs the good. The internet must be able to steer its own course. Censorship is a slippery slope and we must keep it out of our community.
Sources:
Cool and creative anti-SOPA blackout messages – Internet protest in action
Yeah I think the problem is that their good intentions are overriden through either a lack of foresight as to what the bill would actually do or hidden intentions to censor the web. Either way, those acts as written were bad news
ReplyDeleteI see this bill as direct conflict with the first amendment right of free speech, but at the same time I see many people getting ripped off on things they made. How do we protect intellectual property while maintaining social sites?
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