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Super Ginormous

This is the personal site/blog/experiment of Chris Harrison, a web designer living, working and playing in Augusta, GA.

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01.10.2012

SOPA Breaks the Internet

Politi­cians shouldn’t be allowed to leg­is­late that which they do not under­stand. I’m all for copy­right pro­tec­tion, but SOPA is too far-reaching. In a nut­shell, big com­pa­nies will be able to cen­sor any­thing they feel vio­lates their copyright.

Tell Con­gress not to cen­sor the inter­net NOW! - fightforthefuture.org/pipa

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been intro­duced in the Sen­ate and the House and is mov­ing quickly through Con­gress. It gives the gov­ern­ment and cor­po­ra­tions the abil­ity to cen­sor the net, in the name of pro­tect­ing “cre­ativ­ity”. The law would let the gov­ern­ment or cor­po­ra­tions cen­sor entire sites– they just have to con­vince a judge that the site is “ded­i­cated to copy­right infringement.”

The gov­ern­ment has already wrongly shut down sites with­out any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, shar­ing a video with any­thing copy­righted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twit­ter do, would be con­sid­ered ille­gal behav­ior accord­ing to this bill.

Accord­ing to the Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office, this bill would cost us $47 mil­lion tax dol­lars a year — that’s for a fix that won’t work, dis­rupts the inter­net, sti­fles inno­va­tion, shuts out diverse voices, and cen­sors the inter­net. This bill is bad for cre­ativ­ity and does not pro­tect your rights.

This peti­tion on We the Peo­ple: Your Voice in Our Gov­ern­ment, nearly 50,000 peo­ple have signed a peti­tion ask­ing our Pres­i­dent to VETO the SOPA bill and any other future bills that threaten to dimin­ish the free flow of infor­ma­tion. Peo­ple that work on the web have prob­a­bly been more vocal about this issue than most, but this will impact any­one who uses the web in the United States should it pass.

This item was posted by Chris Harrison.

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