SOPA & PIPA. What You Need To Know.

I am most definitely not qualified to post something like this, with it's complexity, and sides of the debate, I am not going to tell you which side of the fence you should be on. However, I believe that you guys, particularly the ones who know of the names "SOPA" and "PIPA" being spammed all over their Twitter and Facebook timelines, but have no idea what they truly mean, should at least have a basic and fundamental understanding of what is going on, what these bills somewhat consist of, and potential "problems" these bills can create.

I strongly feel that even sites like our beloved Touch Arcade (particularly the user generated content provided in the forums, like Sanuku's wonderful impression videos) will quite literally take a beating. We are already seeing major sites like Wikipedia and Reddit blacking out their sites in protest of these bills. But why, you ask? What does it all mean? And how does a site blacking out their content prove, or show anything? I will shed a little light on that shortly, but first here are some facts, and generally what the purpose of the bill is.

The SOPA, also known as H.R.3261 or the "Stop Online Piracy Act", and the PIPA, also known as S.968 or the "PROTECT IP" Act. What are their target intentions? The stated intent of the bills is to provide tools for law enforcement and copyright holders to protect their intellectual property rights. Doesn't sound that bad right? How can something like this generate so much negativity? The devil, as they say, is in the details. PROTECT IP and SOPA will cause too much collateral damage, have a high potential for abuse, and won't even be that effective at stopping the crimes they target necessarily.

Are there any particular differences in the two bills in question? The truth is, both bills are pretty similar in nature. SOPA, is from the House of Representatives, while PIPA is from the Senate. Either or both bills may pass a vote in their chamber of congress on their way to becoming law. Both bills stipulate, as part of their language, that an ISP could be compelled by court order to 'block access to' a website accused of copyright infringement. There are many ways to block traffic on the internet: you can explicitly drop packets destined for the offending site's IP address (firewall), or you can redirect the DNS for that site to some other server you control (for example, if www.piratestuffhere.com were accused of infringement, your ISP could be ordered to adjust its DNS such that www.piratestuffhere.com resolved to an IP address hosting a government web page saying 'this site blocked'.

Quite a few of our fellow Touch Arcadians are from countries abroad, not residing in the U.S. So does this affect them? Absolutely. Many of the sites that you may use (e.g. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.) are all affected by this law and will be required to hide offending domains from you. If a non-U.S. site is blocked in the U.S., the site could suffer financially or even be bankrupted by the loss of U.S. traffic and revenue.

So what are people trying to do to stop this? If you are like me, I use the internet a lot. Watch a lot of gaming reviews, and and clips from in game content. Essentially, that will all be broken. All the music that I preview on YouTube to decide whether I have any interest in the band at all, will nearly vanish, particularly the ones from users without the rights to share that property. All ends of the corporate entertainment industry are in support of these bills, the Motion Picture Association of America, the NFL, NBA, Rosetta Stone, Activision, several several others. So what can you do? If you feel strongly either way about the debate, here is a place you go go.

Please understand that I am trying to refrain from saying anything negatively about these bills, this thread is for education purposes only, it's all up for debate that I will definitely partake in the discussion of.

Here is a simple three minute and fifty-one second video explaining how this can all affect us negatively, considering it having such "Pure" intentions.



And lastly, many sites are taking part in "Censoring" their sites in protest of these bills. Wikipedia, who is having a 24 Hour protest asks you to "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge" and claims that "For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet.". Reddit shut it's site down today for 12 hours as well. Even sites like Google have added their hint of support for the side against the bills.

 

That was a very good article. Knocked it right out of the park of you ask me. Of course it makes my post look kindergarten in comparison, but I was trying to spare people too much detail lol. Made me look like a fool, A FOOL!!!