Internet Censorship: Wikipedia and Others to Stage One-Day Blackout Wednesday

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is “ to promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation by combating the theft of U.S property, for other purposes,” according to House Bill 3261.  

To oppose the bill several websites including Wikipedia, Reddit and Boing Boing are going offline tomorrow to protest the bill. Other companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Mozilla, eBay/PayPal and AOL openly oppose SOPA.

I am going to set aside the fact that the title of that bill makes absolutely no sense and focus on what SOPA really is. SOPA will allow the government to censor the Internet. It will block websites, shut down file sharing, and restrict users from viewing certain Internet content. The act is to be put into place to prevent illegal sharing of movies, music and software for the prosperity of our country but that is a lie.

The music, movie and software companies aren’t going broke because people are downloading pirated content. Around 95 percent of people download there content legally. The government wants me to believe that the 5 percent is downloading content illegally is killing these industries. Lets be honest with ourselves most of the music and movies that are being produced these days are horrible and I wouldn’t want to download it anyways. 

When movies such as Alvin and the Chipmunks Chipwrecked! Makes $112 million its opening weekend at the box office I have a hard time believing anyone is loosing any real money here.

On another note, the last thing I want is more government regulation. Last time I checked every single person on Food and Drug Administration worked for either a major pharmaceutical company or Monsanto’s crooked seed company. Now we will be using our tax dollars to block access to our own Internet. I am sure some regulatory committee will be set up to give the giant corporation the upper hand in control what we can and can’t view on the Internet.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that we have the right of privacy. We don’t, the government can monitor and track each persons web browsing if they want to. So what is the point of this bill? Censorship should not be allowed in this country and now we are going to censor largest source of free information in the world?

The government won’t win. If this bill passes I believe they will start a cyber war and the attackers will win. Yes, I said cyber war hacking groups such as Anonymous, Legion of Doom, and Lulz Security will have no problem not only penetrating these privacy blocks on the Internet, but could very well infiltrated and shutdown the pentagon or any other branch of the government agency.

Here is a list of Public Servants who support SOPA. If you oppose the bill give them a call share your concerns with them.

http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/