SOPA/SIPA legislation threatening a free and open Internet.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/protesting-sopa-what-you-can-do.ars.
The SIPA legislation that is aiming to censor the Internet and take away Freedom of speech is still a threat to the freedom and open-ness of the global Internet. The Wikipedia website has blacked out their website in protest at the censorship of online content. If this legislation is passed, then websites like Wikipedia and Youtube could not exist at all. The freedom to look up your favourite topics on Wikipedia and watch music videos on Youtube would be gone. That is why we need to fight this bill and keep the Internet a free and democratic place for freedom of expression. That is what the main strength of the Internet is, the ability for anyone to start a blog, or a Youtube account and express themselves openly and gain an online audience of followers with the same Interests. If we lose that then what sort of society would be be left with? Congress need to learn that the Internet must remain open and free, it is an incredible source of information on any topic and a good tool for educating others about your favourite topic.
The Internet is so large and complex now, with so much content, that regulating this gigantic computer network would seem to be impossible. But that is what Congress are planning. They would remove all user generated content from Youtube as that video sharing website is full of copyright infringing content, but a great resource for finding old music videos and many other strange clips. What would the Internet be like if Youtube and Wikipedia dissapeared? The outcry would be massive, but are you going to wait until that happens and then cry foul? The Wikipedia blackout is a taste of what is to come if the SIPA legislation is passed in the Senate. Maybe Youtube should blackout their website as well. That would make an impact as well. Wikipedia, recieving as many page hits as that encyclopaedia website does, is doing an awesome thing to educate the masses about the threat posed by the SOPA/SIPA legislation. The websites with the most hits should all blackout their websites to protest this bill, this way the blogosphere and news channels/websites will all be covering this protest and this will reach even more people. I wonder if they will remove open-source software, like Ubuntu and OpenOffice. As that is competing with Microsoft.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/18/0834219/ask-slashdot-what-can-you-do-about-sopa-and-pipa?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29 The Slashdot technology news website has this nice story that has more information on the SOPA/SIPA bills and what you can do to protest this bill. We need to resist any move to censor the Internet. They would have to take down Facebook as well, due to the huge amount of user generated content on that website. That might wake a few more people up. As laid out in the video I have added in my posting, they will make anyone a felon that uploads a video to Youtube that includes music, say you upload a wedding video that includes copyrighted music, then you would be arrested and jailed. This is the future, they are making any copyright infringement a felony and they will jail anyone that even downloads a few songs.
The torrent websites and the whole torrent system would be taken down as well as Twitter and Myspace. The Myspace website has countless user generated videos as well as copyright infringing content, streaming music and videos that infringe copyright. So you can say good bye to Youtube, they are a website that has streamed copyright infringing content to the world at large for years and they would be gone if this legislation passes.