#8
Okay, so this post is gonna be about SOPA; if you don’t already know, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) aka ‘the legislation that will destroy the internet’ is a bill currently being run through Congress that aims to…well, stop online piracy.
Despite this seemingly noble cause, the actual legislation behind the acronym is much more sinister than you might initially realize. Here’s the run-down: if passed, any website that contains copyrighted material, regardless of whether or not the company sponsoring the website is responsible for the infringements, will be blocked through the numerical DNS of the website. YouTube, for example, doesn’t post copyrighted material, but runs the website on which users post copyrighted material (songs, product reviews, video game play-throughs, etc). Normally, YouTube would not be responsible for that stuff, but if SOPA passes, the government would be allowed to shut down the entirety of YouTube (non-copyright-infringing material included) in order to ‘stop online piracy.’
It isn’t just limited to YouTube, though; Facebook, MySpace, Grooveshark, Pandora, last.fm, Blogger, LiveJournal, personal email accounts, and yes, even tumblr could all potentially be blocked, and that’s barely scratching the surface.
Millions of jobs (jobs that did not exist prior to the creation of these sites) would be lost. That’s billions of dollars; Google has a series of tools through which small-business entrepreneurs are able to build their businesses from the ground up…this year, sixty-four billion dollars in revenue was generated from these businesses. If SOPA had passed a year ago, that number would be zero.
However, SOPA isn’t restricted to just destroying a substantial part of our economic livelihoods…SOPA also affects our lives in a more social, more personal manner. For a lot of us, the Internet is our life. We eat, drink, breathe, shit, and love the Internet. The Internet is our friend, and the Internet is our home. The Internet is as much a part of us as we are a part of it.
I’m not even going to try and define how much this website probably means to you, but I do know and will tell you this: everything on this website that you hold dear is on the verge of being obliterated.
Why? Because a handful of billion-dollar bureaucratic bastards feel like they aren’t making enough money (this is a gross over-dramatization, mind you, but I’m kind of pissed off, so that’s just what it feels like they’re doing).
If you are reading this right now, than this bill affects you.
Get informed, and get involved. To quote Network:
“You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do… But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
If this post wasn’t enough to get you riled up, watch this video (he does a much better job of explaining all of this than I): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhwuXNv8fJM
Let the government know that this is not kosher: http://campaigns.dailykos.com/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=53
And for God’s sake, reblog this. I beg of you…reblog this as if your life depended on it, because in all honesty, at least part of your life does depend on it.
-H
