Stop SOPA Day

Starting at 5 a.m. January 18th, it is Stop SOPA Day.

“The bill would authorize the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders against websites outside U.S. jurisdiction accused of infringing on copyrights, or of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.[4] After delivering a court order, the U.S. Attorney General could require US-directed Internet service providers, ad networks, and payment processors to suspend doing business with sites found to infringe on federal criminal intellectual property laws.” – Wikipedia

To explain in laymen’s terms:

“Okay, here’s a general idea of why SOPA is bad. There are other reasons too, keep in mind. Let’s say Bobby uploads copyrighted content owned by Abby to YouTube. If Abby notices this and alerts YouTube, YouTube is legally obligated to take down what Bobby uploaded. This is fine. However, under SOPA, let’s say Bobby uploads copyrighted material to YouTube. Then law enforcement officials are allowed to shut down ALL of YouTube for the single video Bobby uploaded. This means that YouTube would have to check everything any user does before they upload it for the public to see. It’s impossible for one site to check everything any user does to make sure it doesn’t infringe on any copyright, so sites supported by user generated content would have to essentially shut down. Site like YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Vimeo, Flickr, etc. would be dead. So now you are no longer a sheep and justifiably outraged! There’s a whole host of other reasons it’s bad. Note that they’re also trying to pass PIPA which is very similar and also needs to be shut down.” – Ted Eaton, a facebook friend of mine

I believe that this bill if passed would set society back about fifteen years. At least.