By now I hope you have already heard something about the bills that the US government is discussing: SOPA and PIPA. A very basic description is that the laws would give the government free reign to shutdown, seize domains and websites from sites that they deem to be breaking copyright laws. There is also a portion of the bill that could potential take down sites that link to them.
They are also talking about ways to essentially block foreign domains. A lot of this would be done by messing with DNS settings. DNS stands for Domain Name Servers. The DNS hold the master records of where things are located on the internet. It’s like the master list of addresses that the post office has.
So, search engines, forums and even if someone posts a link on your blog. Boom! You could be shut down. This would break the internet. Moreover, it wouldn’t stop pirates. The sites/people that are really dedicated to pirating will simply change their address and set up a new site, while legitimate companies will suffer because of something they can’t control.
Something that is not very surprising, some of the major supporters come from the music and movie industry. The real problem is they are still running on an outdated system. Many of the music/movie companies would rather that the internet just went away rather than adapt their business model, which is based on limited distribution, charging high premiums and paying a fraction of the profits to the artists. Wake up and adapt! Stop trying to kill the internet.
Recently a number of companies wrote to congress explaining how SOPA and PIPA will not stop piracy that the laws would “pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job-creation.” Here’s a list of some of the companies and a link to the letter: AOL, EBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga
Watch the video to learn more.
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
Today a number of popular sites are going black to protest including: Wikipedia, Google Censors logo.
Why The Web Is Going Dark Over SOPA & PIPA
What can you do to help? Sign the petition to stop SOPA/PIPA and call or write your congress representative.
