What is SOPA

 

google logo  blackout
google logo blackout to protest against SOPA

Have you tried accessing Wikipedia? Or opened google?
Do you see something different? Yes Wikipedia is down and google logo is blacked out. This is happening to protest against SOPA.
SOPA (Stop online piracy act) if passed in US would give US government to ban websites under the guise of piracy.
What powers it gives to Government

1. Sites such as Facebook become liable for every comment on their site
2. A website can be banned for even 1 comment that infringes copyright
3. Sites hosted outside US will have to be blocked by ISPs and search engines such as google/bing would be required to make sure they are not shown in search results

Sad part is, the blocked sites will not be blocked, because all people will have to do is: type in IP and bingo . It is not going to stop piracy but can kill legitimate community sites

Who are the beneficiaries
Big media companies such as FOX . They can not only get sites blocked relatively easily but also kill smaller competing websites. These websites will not have the legal muscle to challenge these giants and a will also be thrown into oblivion because of blackout by Google/Bing etc

 

Who loses
Any community site,bloggers, sites such as twitter,facebook,orkut,wikipedia ,reditt,wordpress and users

There is nothing in wrong in the stated sense of SOPA , what is wrong is the law .The power of censorship it gives the governments. Going by this precedent other countries might follow suit and impose more wide censorship.
There already are laws and rules to protect IP, which have been abusedfairly regularly by Media companies, giving them

wordpress blacked out
wordpress blacked out to protest against SOPA

more Legal muscle will only result threatening internet

Register your protest

http://sopastrike.com/strike

 

 

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