STOP The SOPA!!!

Do you Know what SOPA stands for or what it is?

Well, if you use an online site for news, information, a good laugh (tosh.0, colbert repot) or use some kind of social media site like twitter, Facebook, YouTube, reddit, stumble upon, etc. Then you should know what SOPA stands for and how it will effect your life.

SOPA (The Stop Online Piracy Act) is a house bill (H.R. 3261) that was introduced to the US House of Representatives by representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) and by a group of sponsors (Disney, CBS, FOX, WB,Comcast, Sony to name a few). The SOPA bill builds on top of the PRO-IP-ACT / PROTECT IP ACT and If we don’t do something to stop this bill from becoming law then it would give US law enforcement and copyright holders the ability to SUE and even sentence violators up to 5 years in jail.

Now you may be sitting there thinking to your self that well if I was an artist or creator of such content I should be paid for my work. I agree and I am all for that as well but this bill just goes WAY to far. The original bill would allow the U.S Department of justice as well as the copy right holder to seek court orders and sue any website and contributor (The person posting the content) accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Now, depending on who makes this request, the judge and court could include banning any online ad networks and even payment facilitators from doing any kind of business with the so called infringing website.

So what dose this mean? To put it an a easy way for everyone to understand lets say you post a video of your baby dancing to Beyonces new song, filming your kids song and dance routine of their favorite bands song, or you simply just want to post whatever and it has some brand name visible or media playing in the background (visible or not). The site you hosted it on would be banned from search engines, advertising companies would not be able to do business with that company and internet providers will be forced to block their customers from accessing those sites and you the uploader would be fined and sentenced to jail for 5 years on a 1st offense.

WAIT!!! Are you sure you read that right?? Maybe you should re-read that last paragraph??? Sadly what you read is true and about to pass into law if no one does anything. This bill would make it illegal to stream unauthorized copyrighted information a crime and honestly this bill would destroy such companies like Facebook, Twitter, You tube and even your local creative agency like us, Smurk Creative. Facebook has over 800 million active users and 50% of those users access Facebook daily. Twitter generates over 300 million tweets and 1.6 billion search queries a day, as youtube has millions of users world wide uploading 8 years of content daily. As you can see social media plays a large role in most of our lives. Some use internet to connect with friends and family and some use it for their business. What would you do if you couldn’t access these sites or post what you wanted to post?

SOPA clearly violates our First Amendment right and our freedom. Internet censorship will cripple the internet and threaten whistle blowing and other free speech actions. Below is a great video I highly recommend every reader of this blog to watch and if you would like to stand up and voice your self and keep your freedom of speech then I highly recommend you sign the petition @: americancensorship.org. In response to killing the SOPA bill reddit and wiki amongst others will be going black tomorrow to showcase their support against the bill and to show users how it will be without the freedom of speech on the internet. If you would like to voice your self then we urge you to re-post this and share this with as many people as you can.

ENJOY!!