Saturday, December 17, 2011

My son tells me SOPA will cause massive internet censorship

Is this true about the Stop Online Piracy Act? I have to say that as someone who has been watching our congresscritters, when they start scurrying around during the winter break, on Christmas Eve specifically, I just KNOW they are up to no good. Why are they meeting again on December 21, 2011 to work on the Stop Online Piracy Act again? Why are no major media outlets reporting this legislation on their front page? How will SOPA affect the ability of bloggers to use images off the web for reposting? What about videos. My son tells me that if I embed a video or even post a link to a video that uses a copyrighted song as the background music, my site can be barred from the internet. Is this true? Darrell Issa is against SOPA.
"It's very clear that you can have hundreds of thousands of links in a matter of hours," Issa told a House panel evaluating the bill yesterday. "If the LA Times runs an article in their online paper, and they're talking about a site that promotes piracy … we would have to look and say, 'well Google's going to have to cut off the link to the LA times page because that link has a link." "Once you begin to cut off links -- once you become China-esque -- you start a snowball effect from which there is no end." Issa proposes an amendment to the SOPA bill called the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act, or the OPEN Act, written earlier in the month by a coalition of lawmakers including Issa and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). According to CNET, the OPEN Act would interrupt funding to offshore piratical websites by targeting only Internet ad networks and financial providers such as credit card companies -- stopping short of SOPA's approach of allowing the Justice Department to seek a court order blocking Americans from accessing "rogue" websites.
My college boy's favorite website, Reddit, has posted a petition to ask Google to put SOPA info on their front page so that Americans will at least be informed about what our legislature is trying to do.  It may also be time to melt the phone lines and faxes into Washington again.

Update: Teresamerica posted a larger graphic, copied here, and a video.

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