SOPA Is A Loaded Gun

It’s not exactly hippies sticking flowers into the loaded guns pointed their way, but it’s not exactly different either. A protest is a protest. Today, some big name sites came out against the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) that is making its way through United States House of Representatives. As with many recent US policies, it gives sweeping powers to government and corporations under the guise of fighting piracy. Even the act of linking to questionable material could mean the immediate termination of your website. As Wikipedia explains, “…in its current form, SOPA would require Wikipedia to actively monitor every site we link to, to ensure it doesn’t host infringing content. Any link to an infringing site could put us in jeopardy of being forced offline.” If a site is responsible for the content of every other site it links off to, then every site is at risk. How many times have you returned to a bookmarked URL to find that the domain had changed hands, and had completely new content? How many times have you made a typo and found yourself in a NSFW (not safe for work) zone? Well now these ‘mistakes’ could cost you your voice. Your site could be taken down without warning and never returned.

This is bad for everyone. Imagine the internet without Wikipedia? I tried to look up a few things at least three times today, and was greeted by their blackout message (see below). Other sites, like Wired, Google, Amazon, Reddit, Pinterest, Buzzfeed, Tineye, Firefox, and WordPress and many others, also took part, to varying degrees. Only Wikipedia had the kahones to actually block their core services. I applaud them, and look forward to continuing action to keep the internet an entrepreneurial domain, protected from corporate and government manipulation. Taking away rights and freedoms does not make the world a better place. Ironically, even some of the US Government’s own initiatives could be in jeopardy if this bill is passed, such as providing proxy server services to countries with totalitarian regimes.

I took screenshots from all the places I visited today that were participating.