Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

I have been asked by quite a lot of people to explain what SOPA and PIPA are actually all about, what they will do, and why you should be more scared of this than the Zombie Apocalypse.

Basically what it will do is empower the Motion picture and Music industries the ability to black list websites they feel infringe on their copyright, with government enforcement.

To be technical, they want to tamper with the DNS (Domain Name Server) system to give them access to block or remove Internet Domains with the click of a mouse.

So, if you have a website, and you have a link on your website, or a user posts a link on your website, to a site that they feel infringes on their copyright, your website will be blocked.

In doing this, they will effectively break the internet.

And, since over 95% of all websites in the world are registered in the US, this means that your website will be blocked from access world wide.

This is the same censorship technique that China and Afghanistan employ.

Now, to delve further, say you own a Social Media site like Facebook. One of your users posts a link to a song or video on YouTube, your website is now infringing on "copyrighted" material, and can be effectively removed from the internet.

Another example is Monster Cable, the company that makes those horribly overpriced yet terribly inferior cables and wires, supports this bill, their argument being that Craigslist and Ebay infringe on their copyright, because people can buy used cables at a discounted price instead of buying new ones at full price. Yes, they want to remove your right to buy used products. The Motion Picture and Music industries are against Ebay and Craigslist for the same reason, as well as Netflix because people can watch their movies without buying them new.

Newscorp owner Rupert Murdoch (Wall Street Journal,Fox News), is on board because he want to shut down websites where you can read the news for free, like AZcentral.com, CNN, Wired, etc. and ESPECIALLY....Google, the place you can find out anything you want if you know how to look, and has links to nearly every website in the world.

So, while they are saying this is to prevent Online Piracy from overseas websites that sell bootleg DVD's,(which, by the way has almost ZERO effect on the income of the entertainment and media industries) their real intent is to shut down or censor Google, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, Netflix, Craigslist, Ebay, Amazon, CNN, Wikipedia, and literally hundreds of thousands of other sites.

There it is in a nutshell.