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SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) are two bills/laws that are currently in congress which aim to give more control of the internet to copyright holders, mainly the entertainment industry - think of music record labels.

This seems like a good idea, but SOPA can be taken to further action. If a single user on Facebook for example posts a YouTube video of an official music video from a VEVO channel, Facebook itself could be completely removed from the internet.

Similarly, if a reviewer on YouTube either gives a bad review on a device, or shows the device and its company logos, YouTube could suffer the same fate.

Basically any website that shares information generated by users, such as Wikipedia, blogs, eBay, Amazon and any social networking site is put at risk under these two laws. My website is at risk as it publicly shares information that I've created myself. I have joined the petition, and my website will not be accessible.

At the moment, it seems only domains will be blocked, and you'll still be able to access websites via the server IP address(es). Also, if you come across any article that states SOPA is now 'history', don't believe it for a second. It has been put on hold for the time being, meanwhile PIPA still stands as a very big threat to the internet and its users.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o27XCL9JsKI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRKfpBiprIA

Here is what I've posted as comments on both videos:

You pay monthly for your broadband internet service, you should expect to be able to go onto websites that you choose. If SOPA and PIPA are put into action, they will violate these rights that you should be entitled to. When the internet was first released, it was an open and free online world. Why does that have to change? Why should the whole of YouTube for example go down, should one user create a review video containing company logos?

These music record labels are the ones that want this SOPA and PIPA crap, but they seem to forget to realize that they are the ones that are causing it in the first place. They upload their songs to YouTube, which doesn't exactly make it hard for someone to download to their computer(!) Idiots.

This is an outrage to be honest, there is no way a website should be penalized just because someone posts some copyrighted material, the founder or whoever he is of SOPA didn't credit the photographer in the background image he used no his website so technically his website should be shut down.

During the past 24 hours if you saw the Wikipedia blackout 162 million users supported them by saying we couldn't imagine a world without free knowledge, Facebook and Google are also protesting the congress.

The congress webservers were overloaded by protesters and caused them to crash.

Here is a useful link I found which has more information : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...bills.html

Apparently SOPA has been put on hold for now - we have won the battle for now.

Good!

PIPA is still a very serious problem for us though. PIPA is still in action.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16642369

The very last paragraph stands out to me:

Quote:"It begs the question that if you can find and arrest people who are suspected to be involved in piracy using existing laws, then why introduce further regulations which are US-only and potentially damaging?"

Well, they shouldn't still be in action.