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Please, contact your senators today and let them know your opposition to the bills. If you live outside the US, contact your friends in the US and tell them to contact their senators. If you haven't heard about PIPA or SOPA before, learn about them today and tell other people about them today. There's a vote scheduled, and it might pass. Voiced opposition may be the only way to stop it. SOPA may have been shelved for now, but it may come back - and meanwhile, PIPA is still scheduled for a vote next week. They're essentially bills that were meant to set up a means of stopping piracy of intellectual property over the internet - certainly not a terrible intention - but have been so poorly and broadly put together that what is meant to limit piracy instead allows for censorship techniques that can shut down entire websites. Infringed content won't even need to be hosted on a site for it to be shut down - links to the content can be enough. Which not only will make it very difficult to share material across the internet, but it will put strong restrictions on creators to produce anything without being completely sure they would have complete copyright to it. Your favorite websites might look a lot like this one does today - although there won't be even this much on it. Unfortunately, support is bipartisan - of all the things they choose to agree on, this is apparently the one. Consider: most of the big internet companies we all know - Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and so on - they're against this bill, as are many top technicians who truly understand the internet. It isn't just that sites can be shut down so easily, but the vague language in the bill discussing fines and prison - it should worry you. SOPA and PIPA are not the answers for any creator working with the internet who is concerned about work being shared with no connection to the original source. And they really need to be stopped before they become law. |