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No to SOPA PDF Print E-mail
Written by Brooke Smith   
Monday, 06 February 2012 17:22
Google collected more than 4.5 million signatures for a petition in a single day. Did you sign the petition? Do you even know what people are petitioning against? You should know because it will certainly affect the way every college student uses the Internet. The bill everyone is talking about is called the Stop Online Piracy Act. I found out about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) the same way a lot of other people did, through social media. One morning I woke up and my entire timeline on Twitter was filled with petitions and people mad about something called SOPA. Obviously, I wasn't going to join some kind of movement without educating myself on how this bill would affect me.

The Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill that was introduced U.S. Representative Lamar Smith in October of last year. He's a Republican from Texas so right from the start I figured I wouldn't agree with anything he had to say. This bill is intended to stop online trafficking of copyrighted material and counterfeit goods. It would stop search engines from providing links to the sites and it would require Internet service providers to block access to the sites. It would also execute a criminal sentence on anyone who streams copyrighted material. The maximum penalty would be five years in prison.

A large number of websites protested SOPA on Jan. 18 by blacking out their websites. The English Wikipedia was completely blacked out to raise awareness of how much this would negatively affect the way we use the Internet. Google's logo was blacked out and clicking on it allowed viewers to sign the petition and find the phone number to their local congressman. It is estimated that more than 7,000 websites blacked out entirely or had some kind of banner protesting SOPA.

How would this affect you? YouTube would be completely different. Artists would be the only people allowed to post their songs and any videos of television shows or anything else on television would only be able to be posted by the owner of the content. Penalties for streaming any material that happened to make it on the web would be similar to illegally downloading music. It was drastically change the way we use the Internet. Wikipedia would have to monitor everything posted to make sure copyright laws aren't being broken. This would put a huge burden on Wikipedia and if they were found in violation it would cost them a lot of money. It would be extremely hard for them to keep up with monitoring this; therefore they would probably be forced to shut down.

This is America; we have first amendment rights here. I don't want to live in a country that tells me what I can and cannot access on the Internet. Censorship heavily infringes on our rights. What is next? Is the government going to try to control what books we read or what movies we watch? I don't agree with the Stop Online Piracy Act because I enjoy being able to access whatever websites I want. I enjoy watching all kinds of content on YouTube. The biggest reason I don't like the thought of SOPA is because I disagree with the government controlling every aspect of my life. I feel like if SOPA passed it would fuel numerous other bills trying to infringe on our liberties.

It may seem like SOPA is dead now that Wikipedia is back up and Google's logo isn't blacked out. Although Lamar Smith has postponed the hearing for the bill, he is still working hard to refine it so that is can be passed. I don't think that refining it will help, because the central issue will still remain. The bill will still attempt to infringe on our rights no matter how much Smith changes the wording of the bill. You can join the cause by signing the petition at www.google.com/landing/takeaction or by contacting U.S. Congressman Steve Womack at www.womack.house.gov.