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I think I may have been in denial for awhile about SOPA. I heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) peripherally and didn’t pay too much attention at first – I mean, fighting online piracy sounds good to me.
I’ve been blogging here on Mommies with Style for almost eight years now and I’ve been in online media for over fifteen years. I’ve seen a lot of pirates steal a lot of content in my day. Online Piracy is a huge issue and as a content publisher there’s always the risk that someone, somewhere is stealing your content and images which frankly, just isn’t nice and should be stopped.
But as I’ve recently learned, SOPA & it’s counterpart PIPA (Protect IP Act), go beyond just stopping online piracy. They would allow the government to censor everything that’s published online. We’re talking major Big Brother here. Now I happen to love fiction dystopian society novels but there’s no way in hell I want to live in one.
CNN has a video up about SOPA that explains a little more for those interested.
Today, many websites have gone “black” to show their feelings against SOPA. Some of these sites include Google, Wikipedia, Wired and many more names you know and don’t know.
While I haven’t gone quiet or black today, I am anti SOPA and I have signed the petition. I don’t want to go black or be quiet. I want to be able to continue to have my freedom of speech here on Mommies with Style, and continue to encourage people to comment and share their own opinions and thoughts. I don’t want to be told what I can and can’t say – or worse, have to shut down my website and say nothing at all. Frankly, even the possibility of that scares the crap out of me.
Read up and make yourself aware of what these bills could mean to you. While SOPA has been “shelved” that doesn’t mean it’s gone. If it passes, it could mean serious implications to hundreds of thousands of jobs and companies like AOL, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo, Twitter and many, many more.
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