SOPA is bad

Here’s a bias blog post on a very hot topic. A topic that I care very much about and am deeply opposed to. The fact that Obama is not going to veto this appalls me and really makes me upset.

Nancy Pelosi, Ron Paul, Wikipeda and Twitter are just a few against SOPA.

SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA infringes on the first Amendment hard core. Many sites such as Wikipedia and Google are having protests by censoring things on their web site. It’s an Internet blackout against SOPA.

Multichannel Merchant puts it very well:

“In reality, the Stop Online Piracy Act promises to impede pirates very little while potentially penalizing legitimate ecommerce businesses. When you look closer at the language and provisions of SOPA, you see that it could fundamentally change some of the common things you do as a marketer or merchant.”

SOPA impedes piracy very minimally while penalizing businesses much more. A copyright owner could flag any web site (including this one) and a judge could shut it down immediately. Search engines would also be prohibited from listing the web site in search results and Internet Service Providers (like Time Warner, who support SOPA) could force the web site to be blocked.

According to Mashable.com:

“Although many major media companies are backing the bills, the tech industry argues the bills will give excessive power to media companies to shut down sites they think are violating copyrights. According to protesters, SOPA could render any Web site containing links, even if they are user-submitted, practically inoperable or liable to government take-down.”

The Internet isn’t supposed to have these kind of laws. The Internet is a free place for expression. It doesn’t just hurt the consumers – this is going to impact marketing and businesses when it comes to advertising and such.

The International Business Times goes into depth about how SOPA could ruin the Internet:

“If the Attorney General orders a user-driven site like Reditt to remove links to a domain, the site will be required to scour each and every post and comment having links to the domain, even if the particular link contains no infringing content.”

A Google spokeswomen speaks out against SOPA as reported by Reuters:

“”Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and Web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet,” said a Google spokeswoman. “So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our U.S. home page.””

More information and blog posts will follow this one, but take some time to really think about how this will impact the Internet. In the next post I’ll target YOU and why you should care.