Sunday, January 1, 2012

New years

Yep, happy new years. Wheeee, 2012. *Insert arbitrary apocalypse joke.*

So anyways, I don't really have much to talk about. I will return to school tomorrow, and my birthday is Friday. what a great birthday that's going to be. So maybe I should go on a rant about SOPA.

All the people that live me are probably rolling their eyes again. But this is srs business. SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act. Glancing at the title, you're probably thinking, "Oh, stop pirates, let's do it! IMMA GRABBIN MAH PITCHFORK." However, it's actually quite scary. The act is actually a move by big business live Time/Warner or any other big money label to stop the common man from using their material. You're probably like, "Ooh, big deal, I can't cover 'Girl's just wanna have fun' for the seventh time. No biggie." Actually, It's much worse than that. The bill provides cause for the government to request  ISPs block the site from their customers in the following situations:
A site is distributing copyrighted material.
A site is displaying copyrighted material.
A site is hosting copyrighted material uploaded by another user.
A site is hosting a link to a site that is hosting copyrighted material.
A site is hosting audio/video that contains copyrighted material in the background.


This is huge. Millions of sites will be censored, most of them ones that you love. Youtube will almost certainly be censored, along with facebook, 4chan, memebase, tumblr, reddit, and any other site containing copyrighted material. Oh, you wanted to draw a picture of spongebob and stick it on your website? Tata.


Luckily, there is a fight.  Tumblr, Firefox, Reddit, and countless other websites/organizations are rallying together to fight SOPA. You can learn more at www.americancensorship.org