SOPA!

SOPA stands for "Stop Online Piracy Act." this essentialy "Authorizes the Attorney General (AG) to seek a court order against a U.S.-directed foreign Internet site committing or facilitating online piracy to require the owner, operator, or domain name registrant, or the site or domain name itself if such persons are unable to be found, to cease and desist further activities constituting specified intellectual property offenses under the federal criminal code including criminal copyright infringement, unauthorized fixation and trafficking of sound recordings or videos of live musical performances, the recording of exhibited motion pictures, or trafficking in counterfeit labels, goods, or services." In other words SOPA is an act to try and prevent online piracy, aka theft as well as infringment of copyright. SOPA would also require online service providers such as AOL, internet search engines, such as manys favorite, google.com, paying network providers, and internet advertising services, to take drastic measures such as restrain specific services from an infringing site, or even preventing users located in the United States from having access to these sites. (Tragic!) Many people felt that this was taking away our freedom of speech or violating our rights (the first amendment). According to a survey, 64% of people opposed the governments involvement in the public's access to the internet. But property owners feel otherwise, in which they feel that SOPA will initially "protect" their property and jobs, when in reality SOPA would actually destroy jobs since the internet is a huge contribution to the economy, small business, and jobs. SOPA even intended on blocking some legal contact, which I think its pretty ridiculous if you ask me. According to Mike Masnick's studies, SOPA is the completely wrong approach to try and stop online piracy because instead of it decreasing infringment of copy right, it will actually increase costs for new businesses.


When I first heard about SOPA, I did not really understand the reasoning behind it. I was also very concerned, because I'm pretty sure every college student's favorite website is google.com and wikipedia.com and to hear that we might have not had access to these websites anymore was devestating. I felt it was not fair on our part. WE pay the internet bill, I feel that we should be entitled to have access to any website we wish to freely browse. I also feel like it was definetly a violation of our freedom of speech. I also felt like we, as the public, would basically be restricted from having access to any website since everything was considered "infrigment of copyright". I can safely say I was genuinely scared for the future of the internet and for my self. Especially since the year we are in now, 2012, and with the way everything is heading, technology and the internet hold a very important part in everyone's lives whether they have access to it or not. Especially the economy. Nowadays, almost everything is done due to the access we have to the internet and also because of technology. I let out a huge sigh of relief when the SOPA bill was not put into place.