Today there are many huge websites, including Google and Wikipedia who are
blacking out their homepages to oppose two acts before Congress called SOPA and
PIPA. Although I will typically have no desire to discuss politics on this
forum, I want to make an exception to show my opposition to these bills as well.
More formally known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (in the House) and the PROTECT
IP Act (in the Senate), the details of them are too gory to go into in what I
intend here to be a short post. If you want all the details, go here to
Reddit
or here to The
Verge.
Let me start with a disclaimer: Fighting piracy is a noble and useful goal.
However, these bills are set up to do much more social harm than good. From my
perspective, the worst part of these bills is that they give private parties the
right to take down websites “dedicated to infringing content” - without an
adversarial hearing. That is, websites who have been determined to be “dedicated
to infringing content” can have their property removed from them without having
a chance to defend themselves. This seems to be against the right of “innocent
until proven guilty” that was pounded into my head in all those civics classes
in grade school. In addition, the definition of “dedicated to infringing
content” is not specific enough to rule out sites such as, for example, Google.
Could you imagine using the internet without search engines? That’s what I thought.
Anyway, enough of my rambling, here is a list of links to more information:
https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/18/2715768/why-the-verge-and-vox-media-are-opposed-to-sopa
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/protesting-sopa-what-you-can-do.ars
http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html
By far the most awesome is this animated GIF from The Oatmeal:
UPDATE: The gif has been taken down. Nevertheless, The Oatmeal is still awesome
http://theoatmeal.com/
And some links to POPVOX where you can write to your Congresspeople: https://www.popvox.com/us/federal/lawmakers/directory