If the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is allowed to go through then simular screen images will be more and more prominent as content is stripped from the internet as this is the newest attempt by the Media Lobbyists,MPAA, RIAA, and the US Congress to control Internet piracy.
“In addition to domain-name filtering, SOPA would impose an open-ended obligation on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to prevent access to infringing sites…Preventing access to specific sites would require ISPs to inspect all the Internet traffic of its entire user base—the kind of privacy-invasive monitoring that has come under fire in the context of “deep packet inspection” for advertising purposes,” said Center for Democracy and Technology lawyers David Sohn and Andrew McDiarmid in an article written for The Atlantic.
The Stop Online Piracy Act removes the safe harbor that the ISPs are currently protected by now and gives the government the right to have a site’s DNS records blocked out which will make the site appear inaccessible or non existent. So those Google searches you get may lead you to a site that looks like it doesn’t exist anymore, but in fact your government is just blocking it from you, keeping information you wanted hidden.
So if the US takes on the SOPA what’s to say that Canada and other countries aren’t going to follow suit. Our right to information will be gone and we’ll be stuck with censorship like they are in Iran, China, and Korea.
Sites like YouTube, Facebook, and other social media web sites can also be targeted simply because the user can post almost anything. Like posting a funny video that just happens to have a radio playing in the background that has some copy-written song playing at the time can be considered pirated media. Even if I post a video as simple as that on my own personal site, the SOPA can have my web site blocked.
There are some highly reconized politicians that are opposed to the SOPA, and if you can back them up by contacting your local congressperson and tell them to say “No” to the SOPA, then we may still have a chance to keep our right and freedom of information. This doesn’t just effect the citizens of the US, it eventually effects us all.
This is my opinion, and you’re entitled to it.
