So today you may have noticed some weird things going on. Google has a black bar doodle, some sites have gone dark and so on. These two bills, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), are supposed to be bills that stop individuals from posting copyrighted material (e.g., music, TV shows, movies) and that if they do post it and someone reports them as posting it, that all search engines and advertising partners must stop providing links and/or payments to those sites.
Here's the catches: the site that hosts them and the ad sites will also be held liable. And, those actions have to occur
BEFORE any verification and without warrant issued that a site is indeed doing "bad things".
Now, personally, I don't give two shits about copyright violation. In the grander scheme of things, most of the music and video that has been "shared" out there is crap. Pure and simple and an utter waste of time. I will buy legit DVDs of good TV shows and movies; and spend a near fortune on decent music from iTunes.
But I have a serious issue with these two proposed laws. As someone who remembers that the Internet wasn't meant to be an advertising platform but rather a place to share ideas and learn (why I remember when the internet was only in text and didn't have any of these fancy fangled pictures). This ideal of sharing ideas and learning is actually still the core of internet behaviour. This site is a good example.
And this site is a prime example of a site that could be shut down because someone didn't like what a member posted. It could kill us, to be very honest. We don't take advertising and we're more word of mouth but our provider would be required to shut us down if someone posted something (intentionally or otherwise) that is copyrighted **OR** someone reports us as doing that (whether true or not).
And to add to this (for those of you who live elsewhere and think it won't apply.. err.. it will). Part of what makes these bills challenging is the way that they define "domestic" and "foreign": it goes based on the name of the site. For example, my personal site is hosted in Canada (I was too lazy to move it to the US) but the domain name (syrlinus.com) was created here in the US (SOPA defines all ".com" names as "domestic", regardless of which DNS server hosts it). That means if I "violated" copyright (maybe I post up a picture or words to a song) then my site could be shut down. So how can I voice my opinions and views if I'm shut down and have no avenue to address?
So take a few minutes and write your Senatorcritter or Congresscritter and tell them that you don't want these bills as they are written. They are too vague and too broad in their attempt to address the issue they want to. I've provided some more links below, including Google's link to a petition you can sign.
Wikipedia's Entry on SOPA/PIPA
Google's Entry on SOPA/PIPA (petition here)
Reddit's breakdown of SOPA/PIPA