Will SOPA Effect Me As A Website Owner?

As soon as I heard that our wonderful government was involved in yet another extreme power grab and trying to run the internet I was really pissed off. These folks cannot make a budget, run anything at all and are complete failures in my eyes. I have never seen such a mess and now they want to take away the the last breath of freedom from us. The internet is fine as it is right now, we do not need yet another failed government policy protecting the huge corporations. That’s all this is, a big piece of legislation to protect movie makers and music production companies. It would change the face of the internet forever.

Wikipedia does a nice writeup here , It has both pros and cons and lists the makers or sponsors of the bill as it stands right now. This bill would encourage more people ratting on file sharing sites or even the individual website owner like you. Let’s say that you had the rights to some PLR or even resale rights to some software or something like that and were making it available from your website, if somebody wanted to file a complaint, they could get your website shut down with no due process. It would be up to you to prove that you have the correct documentation to distribute the said file.

The SOPA or stop online piracy act is way to broad in scope as it is written right now. I will also include a link for the actual bill so you can read it for yourself. Imagine one morning waking up and going to see your website stats for the previous day, only to find you cannot access your server. That is because this bill would give the hosting companies and the government the power to shut you down for a complaint.

Where Are Our Rights Going?

Nice job people, why don’t you just throw us in a gulag next time why don’t you? What the hell is going on with this country? It is not the wonderful America I was born and raised in, not even close. Our rights as citizens are being watered down every year. And don’t give me that “internet is a privilege” BS. The base foundation of the right to free speech is actually related to the constitution, or have you folks in congress read it lately?

The bill does not need to exist people, we have the DMCA that covers this type of thing. Enforce laws on the books already, not make new broad power laws that reduce our freedoms. I have read where this government we have now has already forced corporations to go offshore, what the heck to do you think this new bill will do? That’s right, people will not put up with it and take their company offshore and leave the country. They won’t have to comply with this new law and they can run their hosting company outside the scope of the law. The general jist of what I was reading is that it will actually force pepole to make drastic business decisions and move away from our nations borders and take the revenue with it.

How Can I Get Involved?

What you can do is to call your congressman and mention the bill that is up for committee and speak your mind. You can visit this site to write your concerns both pro and con at the address here .

I would encourage you to get involved as much as possible, this is a major power grab and creates duplicate laws with an emphasis on a wider net that can be cast to punish anyone that happens to caught in it, both innocent and otherwise. I feel SOPA is to broad and encompassing to be effective and could be used to shut down any mom and pop website they want to silence. In the wake of all the music and movie sharing I can see the reasoning behind this bill, they just need to either kill it as it stands or water it down to protect the normal blogging citizen.