Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Thanks for being patient

This is what had happened.  Somebody had this bright idea to create a bill to go through Congress called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).  Now, while putting an end to online piracy is a good thing, the bill also does a few other things.  One of the biggest things is that it stops all usage by other people, normal every-day people like you and me, from using anything that isn't ours.  It also would allow the US Government to sue and shut down sites that were in violation of the copyright law, which is pretty lax right now.  What does this mean to you?

If it passes, and you have a picture of Edward Norton on your Facebook profile, from a photoshoot with Rolling Stones Magazine, you could not only get sued by Rolling Stones Magazine, but also have your Facebook profile deleted.  It gets worse as if you are doing a movie review site, like my friend Mike: (http://kaleldlt.blogspot.com/) is, and you use a photo or a video of a movie trailer that you found on youtube, then the owners of that material could sue you and have your site shut down.

When I do have pictures on my blog, they are all ones that I have taken, which I believe mans that I own the copyright. This also would and could remove sites that were deemed hateful or racist.  So, imagine if you had used your blog to say that you hate the way the Republican party is doing things.  Well, if someone from the party saw that, they could sue your blog host and have your site shut down.  So, say bye-bye to anything considered on the line and past, nothing anymore of free speech online or porn.  But youtube would essentially shut down.  It would now be illegal to upload a video clip from a show, or use any music that was not yours.  Even if you were uploading a  video of your baby's first steps and the TV was on in the background, you could be sued.

"Opponents of the bill include Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Mozilla Corporation, Reddit,[89] the Wikimedia Foundation,[90] and human rights organizations such as Reporters Without Borders,[91] the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, and Human Rights Watch.[92]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

So, how stupid is this bill and the idea of making internet blacklists and suing regular people?  As stupid as this:

So, anyways, GoDaddy.com supports SOPA and I had tasty-magazine.com as a domain through them.  So, I transferred the domain to someone who does not support SOPA.  That is what took so long.  Thanks for sticking with me.





 

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