I don’t know if you guys have seen the news on SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), but I have taken notice of this proposed bill after seeing multiple posts on Facebook about it. To my understanding from Facebook posts I have read, this bill would lead to mass censoring on the Internet—I didn’t really understand it. So, I decided to do a little bit of reading on SOPA, and what it really entails.
I found an article on CNN that was very helpful in understanding what SOPA is really all about. The Stop Online Piracy Act has been proposed with the goal of cracking down on copyright violation. This “cracking down” would occur through the restriction of access to sites that host the “trading of pirated content”. For instance, YouTube would most likely shut down immediately due to this bill. Google searches would find substantially less search results. This seems like the “Napster” issue all over again. Even after Napster was shut down, more websites with the same intentions popped up all over the Internet.
Tech companies, who are largely against this bill, mobilized their users to speak up for their beliefs on January 18. For example, Wikipedia launched a site blackout. Protesters “hit the streets” in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. A petition has been passed around via the Internet as well.
This article states that the SOPA (and PIPA bill) lost some of their Congressional backers because of the rebellion experienced. Both of these bills were postponed today, January 20.
I still don’t know all there is to know about the SOPA bill, and have not gotten into the PIPA bill yet. Do any of you have any more understandable information on these proposed bills? What are your thoughts? How do you think bills like these will affect the Internet as we know it in the future?
http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/17/technology/sopa_explained/index.htm
