Tuesday, January 17, 2012

SOPA and how it Effects YOU!

Do you use the internet?  Well pretty much everyone does, whether they realize it or not. The Congress is setting to pass a bill called SOPA the Stop Online Piracy Act. You can check out the bill 112 HR 3261 HERE It is aimed to shut down "rouge" websites. Those are the ones that are making piracy of information possible. These are the places you can go and get music and movies and download them without paying for them. Here is a Summary of the Bill from OpenCongress.org

OpenCongress Summary

This bill would establish a system for taking down websites that the Justice Department determines to be dedicated to copyright infringment. The DoJ or the copyright owner would be able to commence a legal action against any site they deem to have "only limited purpose or use other than infringement," and the DoJ would be allowed to demand that search engines, social networking sites and domain name services block access to the targeted site. It would also make unauthorized web streaming of copyrighted content a felony with a possible penalty up to five years in prison. This bill combines two separate Senate bills -- S.968 and S.978 -- into one big House bill.

There is also a great article in the Huffingtonpost.com from Aaron Wang that explains why we should be scared of SOPA. Since he is a professional writer, I'll let him say it best.

So this is all really leading up to an announcement for tomorrow. My tiny little blog will shut down at 12:00am and protest SOPA.  All you bloggers out there should too. If this happens, and you even accidentally pirate an image, song, etc. This will effect you. Fines and prison. Lets all remember the napster nonsense of the late 90's, this will be a billion times worse.

So get out there people, let your fingers be heard! Check out this site for stuff for your blog from Bloggermint.com  


I also ran across this handy little page shut down html.  It's for wordpress.com but it works for blogger too. Just use a html widget and copy and paste. Check preview to see if it works, and voilà, you have a shut down.

So don't feel your the only one, there'll be lots of us out there, namely wikipedia reddit and even google will have a message up on the main site.




bloggermint.com

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