What will happen to ordinary citizens if the SOPA bill is passed?
Saturday, January 14th, 2012 at
2:08 am
What could they be punished for and what will they not be able to do anymore? thanks
Tagged with: Bill • citizens • happen • Ordinary • passed • SOPA
Filed under: News
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Nothing really, some of your favorite sites might get shut down thats aboot it
The internet will be strictly censored and it will become a regulated, corporate-politically controlled manipulation machine much like Television.
Also, the Protect IP act is just as bad as SOPA. Get involved. Call your local Congressional Representatives (in both the House and Senate) and tell them to vote against SOPA and the Protect IP act. Keep the Internet independent. Get your friends involved too. Write letters to your representatives.
I think people tend to forget that the USA doesn’t own the internet. What is illegal in the USA may not be illegal in another country.
Well, as an ‘ordinary citizen’, do you like YouTube? Say goodbye to it. Under this bill, the Attorney General can, on his own authority, just shut the site down if he feels that it is ‘infringing’ on the rights of copyright holders. The ‘infringing’ site has a whopping five days to appeal – but after that, it goes dark.
Did you post a video, or a photo from your favorite band on your site? Say goodbye to your website next. Will the Attorney General be that strict? Who knows. The law doesn’t say ‘go easy on this guy, go tough on that one.’
In fact, he can shut any site down, and remove it from Google’s index under his own authority at any time. He can also cut off access to the site from payment processors like Visa.
In short, it’s handing censorship power over the internet to Big Brother.
Well, nothing more than now, but with a whole lot less due process, especially for sites.
It is another money grab that you will feel later, like when you learn that you have to pony up 36 cents to watch the movie you paid for and downloaded every time you watch it again, and that you agreed to that credit card charge as part of your order.
There are intellectual property grabs out there which you never know about. But you pay higher prices at chain stores because they are there. And they are often undeserved. There is a patent on GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) for Simple Network Management Protocol which is used by large companies to monitor millions of computing devices at their chains of stores.. That patent is crap. It does not recognize prior art. It does not present a single line of code or have a demonstrable product. It is patented as a business method, and claims all creations by anyone that make SNMP easier to use. But it would take 5 years and 10 million dollars to prove it wrong, so people pony up license fees for the right to run their OWN programs that they wrote. And the rest of us pay higher prices so a company without a single inventor, just a CEO and a battalion of attorneys, can get rich.
SOPA/PIPA enable that farcical comedy.