SOPA/PIPA Awareness

I have had a draft of a new blog sitting just waiting to be finished for about a week now, but before I finished that, I wanted to write one about SOPA and PIPA.


I only heard of SOPA and PIPA on Saturday. Saturday night there was a nice little shindig to send my friend Kelsey (read about her travels here) off to Dubai. My good buddy Ben accompanied me to said party and while dropping me off he asked me if I knew anything about SOPA, when I told him no, he explained it to me. How Ben explained it to me was, it's a bill that blocks any site on the internet that hosts or links to copyrighted material being infringed upon.


Here is Reddit's more detailed explanation.
I feel like this is and important portion and pretty well sums up how they feel about it:

"SOPA and PROTECT IP contain no provisions to actually remove copyrighted content, but rather focus on the censorship of links to entire domains.

...

This legislation is aimed at requiring private U.S. entities to enforce restrictions against foreign [offending] sites but does nothing against the infringement itself.

...

When the dust settles, piracy will still exist, and the internet in the U.S. will have entered the realm of federal regulation and censorship."

So what can you do? Conveniently Google has made a petition. Just click that link and put in your email address and zip code.

-Shannon

PS - The aforementioned partially written blog will go up sometime before the end of the week.