Quote:Let's be honest, the people behind SOPA/PIPA are smart, very smart. They know without a doubt the bill will not put a dent in piracy. The kind of people who pirate and run piracy services are far too smart to be brought to heel by mere legislation and have continued to elude the best efforts of the US and it's lackeys. SOPA/PIPA exists for one reason, to protect an aging and crooked business model, dominated by large corporations who are slowly but surely being eroded by people like you and me. These corporations want to stifle the internet because the internet is the biggest threat to their dominance that has ever existed. For decades, through control of radio stations and television channels, corporations have made bank, but now, all the money in the world can't save them from guys in their bedrooms and home-made studios creating content that is more relevant to the current generation. The variety the big media corporations refused to provide because it "wasn't profitable", is now being provided by hundreds of thousands of amateur, semi-pro and professional independent creators and directors and we're all competing for the most important currency of all, time. The time you spend watching our material is time you don't spend watching theirs. It's money directly out of their pocket that they could have been earning before the internet came along and that's the hilarious thing about this whole deal. Piracy is not what's killing their profits, completely legitimate competition from the internet is. They use the cause of "fighting piracy" as a trojan horse to force through bought and paid for legislation to kill independent content creation for good because they can see the end is nigh for their aging and increasingly irrelevant business model. They know they cannot win legitimately, so they do what they've always done, exploit a corrupt political system to bully and extort their way to what they want.

This is what SOPA/PIPA are really about and that is why you should oppose them. You are standing up for what your generation represents, just as previous generations have done the same on a slew of different issues. As much as those in power would like us to believe we are the apathetic, lazy generation. The truth is we are anything but and that scares the shit out of them.

(2012-01-18 22:14)Street Wrote:  Can you imagine the massive boost the ecomony would get if Facebook went down? Productivity in the work place would skyrocket.

(2012-01-18 22:35)Vee Wrote:  Sigh, hypocrites..
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/lamar-smith-sopa-copyright-whoops

(2012-01-18 22:12)Nammi Wrote:  A) correct me if im wrong but isnt it a US law? apart from american Websites are we even hit by it?

(2012-01-19 06:11)Stephen Wrote:  The only other country where the internet is censored like this is China and you guessed it, they're a communist country.

(2012-01-19 07:47)KaraK Wrote:  It's been put on hold, but that doesn't mean it won't get through after the elections.

(2012-01-19 20:54)Thomas Wrote:  

(2012-01-19 07:47)KaraK Wrote:  It's been put on hold, but that doesn't mean it won't get through after the elections.

It's on hold, but it's on hold indefinitely.

(2012-01-20 07:14)McGherkin Wrote:  If they can shut down Megaupload without PIPA and SOPA, then clearly we don't need these new laws.