SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act bill. If the bill is passed, the US government will be able to go after any foreign site hosting unauthorized copyrighted material. This could include asking ISP (internet service providers), credit card companies and online advertisers to cut all ties with the sites.
The bill would cause problems for file sharing sites such as The Pirate Bay but may also cause problems for social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Any website which links to sites containing copyrighted material could be asked to remove all links to that site.
Several sites are taking part in a 24-hour Internet blackout today (Wednesday 18th January 2012) in protest. Sites taking part include Reddit, Wikipedia, BoingBoing, Mozilla, WordPress, TwitPic, and the ICanHasCheezBurger network.
Other sites have taken a different approach, Google has blacked out its logo and Flickr has given users the option to black out their photos.
Some companies were in favour of the new bill when it was first announced. One of the most famous was hosting website Go Daddy. However due to public pressure and 37,000 users moving their websites to other hosts in just two days the company made a U-turn.
The future of the web lies in the hands of the US government or so they want us to believe.
If you have made a statement against SOPA or have a strong opinion for or against it, we would love to hear it in the comments below.
5 Responses
I has been an interesting battle between the US government and website owners worldwide.
The internet is more than a sideline, for businesses it can be their main source of income and several sites could see profits fall because of the changes in law. Megavideo is the perfect example, the owners were making millions on site memberships and now that the website has been pulled the company has no source of income.
This bill is ridiculous, how can they police the internet? This will have a huge effect on social media, espeically YouTube, with ’48 hours of video uploaded every minute’ how can they monitor all of it? I really can’t see this happening.
I am glad this law didn’t pass, we were going to lose a great deal of empowerment.
happy it ended that way :)
I agree, if SOPA passed things would have become ridiculous.
Companies want to keep their old business models and seem too lazy to change. They have seen their profits fall astronomically month after month and have now tried to force the government to pass a crazy bill.
They only want us to have access to the information that they think is correct and fine for us to see.
Sopa is just dumb. Being in a third world country, the internet is one of the fastest way to earn a living since jobs here are unavailable — mainly due to corporate – government corruption.
I fear they will pass another bill under the radar.