I could hardly hope to write a more compelling or comprehensive post regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act or Protect IP Act than the multitude of sites already covering it. This bill is simply wrong, and in case Wikipedia's protest blackout yesterday caught you off guard and unaware, here's a collection of information about the SOPA\PIPA bills and how they will exact Draconian control of free speech through internet censorship, not to mention hurt the very technological foundations of the Internet.
- Wikipedia - as always - does a fine job of explaining the legislation in a neutral manner.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation delineates some of the problems with SOPA.
- Check out this link if you want to see the full list of blackout participants (Warning: 75,000+ is a lot of hyperlinks to load, so expect your computer to slow down or crash when you try to load it)
- This all of course builds on the original protesting of GoDaddy, who originally supported the bill and watched as they lost thousands upon thousands of domains on Boycott GoDaddy Day, the full details of which can be found here.
The important thing to realize is that for all intents and purposes, SOPA is dead. Yes, that means that internet protests work. However, PIPA is still around, and a new bill has been presented by the computer industry in the wake of all this that seems so far to be an acceptable alternative, OPEN.
I wish I had more time lately to develop a proper post about this issue. I also wish I'd bookmarked the various sites that posted really moving explanations of why they were blacking out. Sadly, homework must be done. I apologize profusely and offer you this last bit of linkage as a token of my sincerity:
Feel free to fill in the blanks in the comments, faithful reader(s).
But what about Time Warner's profit margin? That's the only thing that matters.
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