If You're a Good American Don't Read This

I'm shamelessly copying this from my friend Terri at A Girl in the South. SOPA is bad, m'kay? However, I'm not going on strike, because ... who suffers from that besides me? It seems to me that we would only be striking against ourselves, which is kinda nuts. Also, I don't know if I can get through a day without the Internet.

Because Censorship Is Never Okay

No recipes for Wednesday.

In solidarity and protest against SOPA and PIPA, A Girl in the South is joining the big wigs of the internets like Reddit, Wikipedia, Boing Boing and hundreds (if not thousands) of other sites and blogs by going on strike tomorrow, January 18th from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) could have a devastating effect on numerous websites, even little ones like ourselves. We are taking a stand against Censorship and urging everyone to educate themselves on this bill and contact your representatives if you agree that SOPA is a really bad fucking idea.

Why is it so bad? (Excerpt taken from here)

The broad definitions in the bill create tremendous uncertainty for nearly every site online. This sounds like hyperbole, but it is not. Defenders of the bill like to claim that it is “narrowly focused” on foreign rogue infringing sites. Nothing could be further from the truth. While PIPA targets only foreign sites, the mechanism by which it does so is to put tremendous compliance and liability on third party service providers in the US. SOPA goes even further in expanding the private right of action to domestic sites as well. We’ve already seen how such laws can be abused by looking at how frequently false takedown claims are made under the existing DMCA. Of course, under the DMCA, just the content is blocked. Under SOPA all money to a site can be cut off. Under PIPA sites will just end up in court. Or, with both laws, an Attorney General can take action leading US companies to have to effectively act as network nannies trying to keep infringement from being accessible. None of this is good for anyone building a startup company these days. The massive uncertainty around this, combined with the need for a huge legal department sitting in “the garage” as a startup begins, will certainly slow down the pace of innovation in the US, while likely driving it elsewhere.

While it’s true that our President has said he will not allow the SOPA bill to pass (but PIPA is still alive and kicking), it’s important that our government realize that we will not tolerate their efforts to take away our freedom of speech. Copyright infringement is a shitty thing, without a doubt, but these two bills are the absolutely dead wrong way to handle this.

List of sites joining the strike - here 
Joining in the blackout? Register here We encourage anyone who wishes to participate to join in the blackout.
Find more information about SOPA here, here and here. Oh, and even though this is Cracked.com and not meant to be taken seriously, here is a very funny and alarmingly true possibility with PIPA/SOPA.