General Chat / SOPA & PIPA

Hi.
I know I'm not active on this site anymore, but I've become very interested in the bills SOPA and the less extreme PIPA and come to speak against them. First some basic sources of information.

SOPA Subreddit
A brief introduction
News Article

Why is this bill even being forced through congress? Major companies are paying off the government to have this bill put in place. Old and clueless men with good intentions are threatening the internet as we know it. Just shooting companies from the top of my head that support SOPA are: Disney, Godaddy(Later withdrawing or pretending to withdraw due to major profit cuts due to customers withdrawing their domains. Wikipedia is a major one that has moved from Godaddy.), Rolex, Nintendo, 3M (Famous for their post-its), varieties of wine and cigarette brands,

Major disapproval from the international internet population has been for the most parts ignored. That didn't stop the internet community from boycotting SOPA supporting companies. As a result of severe boycotting, the CEO of GoDaddy released a statement on SOPA and how they reversed their position on it. Many people doubt this statement and assume it's just an attempt to slow down the boycott, after all they directly assisted in writing the bill, in return they got immunity from rules and consequences of SOPA.

Major companies like MySpace, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Zynga, Mozilla, Tumblr, and Twitter have spoken against SOPA and sent emails to US government expressing their position.

I believe even if the congress has good intentions now, giving them the major power to censor the internet like China and Iran will sure to be abused sooner or later on.

What can we do? Fight, get the word out, sign online petitions, e-mail and boycott companies that support SOPA. If the supporters of this bill see that people are getting activist and finding out about SOPA, they will all release a statement like GoDaddy and drop their support for the bill. If the government has no incentive for passing the bill and a major population of citizens and international community disapprove of it the government has no reason to pass or even discuss the bill.

And this THOSE affect anybody outside of US who visit websites that are hosted on US domains. So it's just not confined to the US.

Already made a thread about it here: http://www.nedesigns...very-important/