SOPA

[dowhatnow]

The answer's obvious, but the question remains: what does it mean to you? Is it just some other attempt at money-grabbing by organizations like the MPAA and the RIAA? Or is it a genuine (albeit misguided) attempt to stop piracy/copyright infringement/anything else the bill would allow law enforcement to "bust" people for?

My two cents:

• Corrupted, Special Interest-purchased Congress
  Fat cats failing in copyright infringement lawsuits looking for [even more] federal assistance
  The Administration hates anything having to do with civil liberties and/or constitutionally protected freedoms

/rant

tl;dr: If you value things like Facebook, Pandora, YouTube, Reddit and the like, and you reside within the US, you should be vehemently opposed to this bill.

Edited December 23, 2011 by dowhatnow

[Eechi-go]

Things like this make me think all three branches of the government need to be assassinated at once so we can do a mass purge and get less idiots up there.

[Rhapsody]

Sucks to be Americaaaan. I'm surprised it's even around, though. Aren't you guys crazy about your freedom n stuff?

[Azure]

America is always deciding whether we want freedom, or money. It just so happens those two can be completely opposite

I hope congress realizes that the opposition to the bill...is the bridge between the US and the world. Taken from the title, are you really promoting creativity by sheltering the influences?

[Major]

Text wall incoming, I was waiting for someone to talk about this.

SOPA is horrendously bad for online businesses (or to a lesser extent, anyone), even if you don’t live in the United States. If you have a US domain name (.com, .org) they can seize the domain name. If you rely on funding from a US based payment processor (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal) they can blackmail them to cut funding to you. (And yes, it is at its core blackmail, SOPA basically says that copyright holders can say “This site is infringing my rights, willingly cut off services to them or I’ll hold you liable for their actions.” –they don’t even need a court order.)

Even if your site is entirely based in another country, and you don’t get funding through paypal or similar US based service, you’ll still lose a lot of US based traffic as SOPA orders blocks to IP addresses too (even though that’s practically impossible to implement without degrading the entire infrastructure, but we’ll see what happens).

Not only that, the worldwide most popular search engine is Google, and being in the States means that they have to remove your website from their database if asked to, which means a huge cut in traffic. That said, however, Google pulled out operations in China when they set up their nationwide firewall, I totally expect Google to close up in the States and move to another country.

What’s annoying is, from watching the markup, 2/3 of congress don’t know how the internet works. The other 1/3 have a rough idea, but want to call in expert council to discuss the bill, but the other 2/3 want it to pass as is, they don’t care how badly it 'breaks' the internet. (or maybe they WANT to break the internet, I don’t know) From what I understand though, Obama plans on vetoing the bill if it goes through congress.

Either way, I was kind of thinking they were pushing SOPA to make PIPA look less serious, all so the American people would say, “Ehh compared to SOPA, PIPA isn’t too bad…let it pass”. Keep in mind all the attention is focused on SOPA right now, so protect IP could pass.

I have more to say but in the time it took to type this on my phone, my battery all but died. Blah. I certainly hope this doesn't pass, its one of the first steps on a slippery slope.

[dowhatnow]

Things like this make me think all three branches of the government need to be assassinated at once so we can do a mass purge and get less idiots up there.

This.

Violent bloodbath on Capitol Hill Coup d'état, anyone?

Sucks to be Americaaaan. I'm surprised it's even around, though. Aren't you guys crazy about your freedom n stuff?

The general public is, yes. But since when do special interest-funded Congresspeople give a damn about their constituents [aside from election years], much less freedom, so long as they can line their pockets with fat stacks of cash?

America is always deciding whether we want freedom, or money. It just so happens those two can be completely opposite

The two are almost always mutually exclusive. Except in the case of, oh, I don't know, billions of dollars [and possibly man-hours] in wasted money [and effort] towards "Patriot Act" enforcement. Get rid of that, I guarantee we'll start to have more money and a fair deal more freedom.

[cntrstrk14]

This bill is so dumb and the rise against it is so massive I can't imagine it passing without heavy, heavy edits. I was listening to the debate last week live and it was painful to listen to people who "aren't nerds"* try and decide how to control the internet. The best part is that even if this bill goes into effect, there are various extremely simple ways to circumvent any blockages. This will not only seriously hinder the ability to express one's self on the internet, but it will also not even stop the piracy it is trying to! I won't write a lot here, because I will never leave this thread, but if you do NOT know about this bill I suggest you go and read some news articles NOW. Also, check out this site and sign the petition if you are against the bill (after educating yourself on the matter).

Demand Progress

Stop Censorship Petition

* - Yes, they actually said, many times in the hearing, that they were not "nerds" and that they had to talk to "nerds" to learn about the subject. Some even claimed to not be "nerds" and then continue to give their uneducated opinion.