For all you idiots who are siding with the government on censoring the internet because of piracy or dissent. Think of it like this, the government can ban guns and it only hurts the decent people who have guns for protection. While a criminal does not follow the rules and can get a gun illegally. Censoring only hurts the majority of good internet users. Bad ones always find loop holes no matter what. The universe is always balanced, you cant take out bad as much as the government wants to they are just making it worse like trapping the bad ones in the corner and the only way out is....
Think of this analogy. You gave up freedom to be part of this website and use the trainers. In our Terms of Service, it states that the staff is in their full right to terminate any part of the service for any reason they want. Virtually every single website carries this one rule with them (Mark Zuckenburg can ban you from Facebook for the reason that he simply does not like you). Limitations to expression on the internet has always existed yet not everyone exercises it to that extent.
Taking the analogy further, this is similar to a few bad users getting a trainer retired because it's no longer a good investment to micromanage to benefit those who used it. Same thing is happening. Nobody is helping to solve the piracy problem leading to a runaway problem in which drastic measures need to be taken. Sure there's lots happy paying for software, but nobody is saying "look go and use free software if you don't want to pay".
This is the top list (probably outdated by now) of the most commonly pirated software. Few people actually know the alternatives other than go to a torrent site and download an illegal copy (and if you pirate anything on this list, you're a hypocrite to your own cause in my eyes):
Link
You want to stop the companies from taking these drastic measures? The internet community needs to be taking an active effort to maintain the software ecosystem and direct people to the GNU software if they're unwilling or unable to pay. The more attention these alternatives get, the more they become the standards and thus getting rid of a huge incentive for why this bill came into place (because you cannot infringe on free software).
[Edited by Neo7, 11/18/2011 6:15:58 PM]
[Edited by Neo7, 11/18/2011 6:17:13 PM]
I think you're missing the point of Protect-IP and SOPA. Before these, we had HR 1981, which would've effectively forces ISPs to retain financial and personal information for 18 months because everyone could possibly be trying to access child pornography, now, or in the future, as my Congressman so astutely noted in his auto-reply email: It's for the children!
Or my senator on SOPA: Intellectual property good! Money, good! DNS, who cares about that?
I don't disagree that counter-arguments from some groups are just as bad as the lawmakers, but at least most of them aren't making inordinate amounts of money to shout at each other "for the people." But by current US political standards, I'm an extreme pinko socialist, so my opinion doesn't matter to anyone in the US.
From what I understand you only have something to worry about if you are doing something you shouldn't.
Sure, it could be abused, and if it is then jump up and down and protest by all means... but wait and see how the law will be used first.
That's the problem. That's realistically not how US politics works any more. I mean, look at how long it took us to "solve the debt crisis." It was an artificial problem, and raising the debt ceiling is done quite frequently. Why was it such a big deal this time? GOP wants more seats, so they did what they do best and created a problem to make it look like they were going to solve it. Which brings me to:
That's why I believe the bill is poorly written (or rather using a bad strategy). Technically you can circumvent it with extreme ease by setting your DNS settings to something like OpenDNS.
That's why we're so screwed as a country. If the law is not precise, exact, and strictly written to its addressed purpose, all it takes is a local court to say "well, go ahead and take down youtube and google for all your users, ISP #1." Google appeals, and the ruling is granted in their favor due to the uncertainty in the law.
So Big Business (that paid for the bill) #1 decides to take it to state level. Google wins again. Then it's taken to a federal level. Then the Supreme court. Supreme court ruling invalidates all previous rulings, states that Big Business #1 was well within its rights to file, continues to roll downhill as congress "debates," when really, every politician in the States is far right of center, "liberals" here still blow-for-blow agree with everything conservatives do, but they have to make the ideas sound even worse - for the people!