stop sopa

Hopefully you noticed that this weblog “went dark” for 12 hours earlier today.

Did you take the time to find out why? If not, feel free to watch this video now:

Or read this explanation:

What are SOPA and PROTECT IP?

The PROTECT IP Act (S. 968) and the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA (H.R. 3261) would devastate job-creating American technology companies and social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in the name of protecting Hollywood copyrights. These bills would create a “Great Firewall of America” by embracing the same Internet censorship tactics as the world’s worst human rights abusers, including regimes like communist China, Iran, Syria, and Burma. A number of technology experts have concluded that these bills would mean “the end of the Internet as we know it.”

What does it do?

• Allows any content provider to accuse a website of promoting infringing content and have that site blocked from the Internet.

• Gives Eric Holder and the Justice Department control over the process for shutting down websites.

• Guts the tried-and-tested Digital Millennium Copyright Act — which allowed Google and Facebook to thrive in the first place — by shifting liability for policing copyright to social media sites. Every tweet and status update would have to be pre-checked for copyright violations, rather than taken down upon notice of infringement. This would destroy the social networks that small businesses use to find new customers, members of Congress use to communicate with constituents, and the Arab Spring revolutionaries used to overthrow tyrannical regimes.

• Breaks Internet security by tampering with the Domain Name System (DNS) and encourages the development of an insecure, offshore pirate DNS.

Because this is the only material I am putting up for today.

Oh, and, yes, I am voting for the net.

Which means I will NOT be voting for either Lamar Alexander or Bob Corker for any future office at any level of the United States Government. The only way to stop stupid laws like this one from even being proposed is by voting out those morons who propose, support, or endorse them.