Stopping the SOPA Bill and the #BlackOutSOPA Protest
 |
As some of you may have noticed, Web Vitals went completely dark yesterday in an organized protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, or SOPA and PIPA for short. If these bills pass, intellectual property holders can literally take down your domain name or any social media accounts that you have and control them.
To be honest, it’s ridiculous that something like this would even be considered. It’s such a blatant violation of freedom of expression disguised as something that would stop piracy.
Here is a quick video if you want to know more:
The Movie Industry is Filled With Idiots
The fact is, you’ll never stop piracy. It can’t be stopped. The funny thing is, the movie industry seems to spend more time and money stopping people from pirating than they do on making something that’s actually useful. I’ve noticed the same damn story line in wayyy too many movies.
So what do they do because they can’t make good movies? Well besides pimping out every super hero, comic book or childhood toy brand they can for movie rights, they decide to focus their efforts on owning and controlling the internet; and that’s what SOPA and PIPA let them do.
Not to mention all of the stupid stuff they do like remove special features from rental DVDs, add advertisements ON THE DISC of their movies, and make it nearly impossible to back up YOUR OWN MOVIES.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) and other protective mediums don’t stop piracy; they only negatively impact the user experience when someone legitimately buys a copy.
Think about what this actually means. Digital content can be copied endlessly at no cost…it costs $0 to copy a movie. That means it costs them $0 when someone pirates their movie. The movie industry like to add up all of the people that pirated their movies and multiply that by the cost of the movie, and say that that’s the revenue they “lost” because of piracy.
They need to realize that the majority of people that pirate software or movies would never make a purchase anyway. If they can’t download them, they won’t watch them…so how is that costing the industry money?
It’s not. They’re just greedy bastards.
Protest Play-by-Play
Before 1/18/2012:
Countless users of various social media sites (including @WebVitals) protested the bill by adding “STOP SOPA” to their profile picture and using the hash tag #BlackOutSOPA referring to the site dedicated to stopping the bill.
12:00 AM, 1/18/2012:
Webvitals.com goes dark along with major internet players like Wikipedia, BoingBoing, Reddit, Wordpress, Firefox and Metafilter. Bigger sites like Google, Craigslist, Vimeo and Amazon blacked out parts of their sites to ask users to sign a petition.
9:00 AM, 1/18/2012:
It turned out that the congressman that wrote the actual SOPA bill violated copyrights ON HIS OWN WEBSITE by not giving a photographer credit. If SOPA was already law, the photographer that took that photo could take control of the senators website for the copyright violation.
12:36 PM, 1/18/2012:
The majority of U.S. Senate websites went down due to the flood of traffic the protests sent asking people to contact their senators and request the bill be stopped.
1:30 PM, 1/18/2012:
Multiple high-profile cosigners that previously supported the SOPA bill switched sides and changed their position to opposing it instead.
What the Protest Achieved
The bottom line is that we witnessed democracy in action. I would call it a success. Its amazing really, because I thought at this point the internet was doomed. Megacorporations and the movie industry have a lot more influence (Read:cash) than I do, so I figured they would pull something out of a hat and go around those that opposed it.
Really, we’ll have to wait and see. PIPA is scheduled for a vote in the Senate on 1/24/2012.
As of today (1/19/2012), the #BlackOutSOPA protest has over 80,000 protesters that singed the petition and are actively trying to stop SOPA. This kind of unity is unheard of on the internet, and so many sites have joined forces to prevent this bill. It is clear what the people want, and the government’s job is to serve the people. If it still passes, there truly is no hope for our government.
If you’d like to join the fight, go to http://www.blackoutsopa.org and change your profile picture and share with your friends.
We need all the help we can get.
Related Posts
No related posts.
I call it a success, and a victory for the battle. The war however is just beginning. Don't let the united states government take away freedom in exchange for "Security" - that's how the Holocaust started. We have to stand up and fight this bill...for the freedom of the internet and the future of open communication. Giving the movie industry the ability to sure someone out of existence for one blatant copyright violation is ridiculous, especially since many are not even aware of what they are doing.:)
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like