Sopa and Pipa

Thanks to action by a broad and bipartisan coalition of Internet users, companies, and organizations, the U.S. House of Representatives has now put the brakes on SOPA, a well-intentioned but deeply flawed bill that would use Internet censorship to combat overseas copyright infringement. Even President Obama's White House has joined the opposition.
But nevertheless, the Senate is continuing to move forward — and fast — with its equally dangerous version of the bill, called PIPA, the Protect-IP Act. As written, PIPA would import censorship and surveillance techniques pioneered by countries like China and Iran, reversing longstanding U.S. policy on Internet freedom, betraying U.S. First Amendment values, damaging our standing around the world, threatening our job-creating innovators, and undermining Internet security for everyone.
Today is a day for action across the Internet. Learn about these destructive bills. Tell your Senator what you think. Congress needs to hear from you.

Well way to go people... I went to use Wikipedia last night and found out they decided to black out in protest of SOPA and PIPA. Apparently these two bills are too loosely stated and would end up blocking anything deemed to be "copyrighted". From what I hear, this includes uploaded videos of 4 year olds singing songs they did not get explicit permission to sing from the band who wrote it. (Beiber did not approve of you singing his song.) This has deeper implications for sites that allow people to copy and paste whatever they feel like onto them (Like Wikipedia, Twitter, Tumblr, Blogspot, Youtube...)

All of this was made in an attempt to prevent Piracy from occurring. People stealing downloaded music, or uploading videos from tv shows, or posting movies for free with out permission... You know, the Internet. They say that Record companies and Movie companies need to start modeling themselves after China because in china they work around the Piracy issue by selling things quickly and jumping on the first spike of sales as high as it will go. Shortly after their music/videos are released they become pirated, so the only time to profit is from the initial sale and then it's back to creating new stuff to put out.

The Record and Movie companies put stuff out, but then they copyright everything and try to ride out every last sale for the next decade or so. Like Buffy- it's still copyrighted even though it's been who knows how many years and nobody really watches it anymore. You post one episode of it on Youtube and it will be taken down in a matter of seconds. It is true that the companies have a right to copyright their material, but with PIPA and SOPA they're being a little overzealous. As a result, the media is reacting to it in an overzealous way. Lots of sites are jumping on the band wagon and proudly proclaiming they are "Pro-Liberty". Whatever...

It's too bad a lousy bunch of people who decide to upload and download illegally have ruined everything for the rest of the population who just wants to share pics, vids, and music in a legal way that obeys copyrighting laws. Now the laws are trying to become more strict and people are reacting to it very adversely.