Stop SOPA

Do you love the Internet? Free music? Global connectivity? A new bill, being called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, has just been passed in the United States that will have just about everything you love about the World Wide Web taken down. Don’t think for a second that just because you’re not in the U.S.A. that you’re not effected by this; the bill, also known as the Protect IP Act, caused a massive surge of outrage among millions of people. It has the potential to destroy the balance of the Internet. The government will have the ability to sue and completely remove sites for simply linking to or quoting copyrighted material. This is HUGE. Sites like Wikipedia, Twitter, YouTube and Google (powerhouses of the web), could be completely eradicated, because this new law states that the sites themselves are responsible for anything posted or uploaded on them. Think about the millions of posts, videos and images uploaded daily to these sites. If you still don’t see the big deal, think of it this way; remember that link you posted on Facebook to JBieb’s new official video? The one that’s supermega copyrighted, but you posted anyways so all of your friends could hear it? According to SOPA, you can now be hit with a massive fine, thrown in jail, and the host site can be completely taken down. And I mean completely. That’s more than 500 million users effected due to a single post that someone linked to a copyrighted video. The excuse behind the ridiculous bill is to eliminate piracy. It won't work. Instead, it will see the end of freedom of self-expression, the sharing of knowledge and media and the main principles of the Internet. Startup companies and sites will be less and less likely to succeed, videos and images will stop going viral, and global events (i.e. Libya, Occupy Wall Street) will go unpublicized.

On this, the 18^th of January, 2012, Wikipedia, Reddit and several other sites have “blacked out” for 24 hours to protest this bill. This means that for an entire day, they have shut down their sites to show the outward aggression towards SOPA. The bill, unsupported by just about everyone including president Obama, cannot be allowed to be put into effect. According to the Protect IP Act, in the course of this article, I could have been arrested three times and would have been the cause of YouTube, Wikipedia and Reddit being eliminated from the Internet. Protect your online rights; speak up, save the internet. Stop SOPA now.