This website is dedicated to my family. I use this website as a base to publish my genealogical research, share family pictures and recipes, and to be a point of contact with people who may be distantly related. Whether I update this website once a week or once a year, this website is here for everyone to see.
Web blogs are set up to allow their author’s to share their passions with the world, and two of mine (besides my family) is politics and technology. Its not often when so many of my passions converge into a single entity, so when I heard of this happening, I just had to share it with you.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, H.R. 3261) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA, S. 968) are in the works in Congress. These bills would give the government and the bill’s commercial backers (the MPAA, RIAA, GoDaddy.com depending on who’s asking them, and others) unprecedented authority to have essentially have websites shutdown on demand. If you combine the broadly and ill-defined terms of this bill with the fact that EVERYTHING in Washington becomes corrupted over time, this leads to the very real potential for oppressive censorship of the internet for little or no provocation.
The bills’ lead backer is Republican Congressman Lamar Smith continues to defend the bills despite growing protests from the internet community and conservative politicians in Washington. Congress will vote on these bills sometime within the next two weeks, and I urge everyone to call their Representative or Senator and tell them to vote No on SOPA and PIPA. Yes, online piracy should be addressed, but not at the expense of our freedoms.
Thanks, for reading. I’ll step down from my soapbox now.
Bob Lee
Below are some links for more information:
- WordPress: Help Stop SOPA/PIPA
- New York Times
- HostGator: SOPA must Die!
- Wikipedia – SOPA
- Wikipedia – PIPA
- Google – End Piracy, Not Liberty
To lookup and contact your Congressional representatives in Washington, D.C.