Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Stop SOPA

This is going to pertain more to our US readers, but what this bill would do affects all internet users across the globe. We don't usually include topics of a political nature, but we feel that this is an issue that affects us all.

You may notice that there is a little black ribbon in the corner of our blog today. As people who generate creative content and intellectual property, we have pretty strong views on taking other people's work. However, the way the SOPA and PIPA bills are being put forth in the House of Representatives and Senate won't stop on-line piracy. What they will do is severely limit what has been an open exchange of ideas on the web. Online piracy will find a way to work around these bills, but your average user will not.

From Wikipedia (which is going dark for 24 hours in protest):

SOPA and PIPA are badly drafted legislation that won't be effective in their main goal (to stop copyright infringement), and will cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. And, SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.

We urge you to protect the free and open web. Call your representative and take tell them this bill means bad business.

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