Once again, for my job, I cite lots of information and I check the citations of others. While searching for a book, Report On Indians Taxed and Indians not Taxed in the United States (Except Alaska) at the Eleventh Census, 1890 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1894), I found an online archive that had it available. I clicked on it and found this:
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| The website is: www.archive.org |
---Side note: This protest does not influence Congress in any way. It only frustrates their interns who are trying to find information for their Senators or Representatives. It also influences normal people, which I suppose gives the movement more support from people unhappy that they couldn't use Wikipedia to finish their report.
I don't think the legislation will pass. There is a lot of grassroots animosity toward it, plus President Obama has said that he will not support it. Censorship is stupid and keeps people from being informed*, but there are a lot of problems with illegally downloaded music, websites that stream TV shows without the copyright, and so on. These are dishonest and people should really evaluate their actions on the internet.
I had a friend on Facebook make a good point: Everyone is upset about this sort of censorship, but what should really be censored and what should Congress really put their feet down on? Pornography. It is already illegal and is very damaging. Some things, such as pornography, should be removed and censored from the internet.
For goodness sake people, try to be honest and live in a moral way. We wouldn't have these problems and huge fears about the government taking over our lives if people would just treat others the way they want to be treated.
So I still don't know where I stand on the issue. Since I've only known about if for one day, I can't say that my opinion is educated. And I would guess that most of the people posting things like this on Facebook are not very informed about the issue either. This goes right into my issue with people going along with "cool" and "conscious" companies such as Google or Toms (I read a great critique of Toms yesterday, see this article) because they think they are doing the right thing. Going along with companies is no different from going right along with the government if you are uninformed.
I'm not saying that I support SOPA or PIPA. As my experience shows, I was directly influenced by this psuedo "censoring" on the internet. I'm not saying that I oppose the potential legislation. I'm just saying that there are problems with the way people use and abuse information available on the internet.
As SOPA's name states, stopping online piracy would be a good thing. Censoring pornography would also be a good thing. Limiting free speech would not be such a good thing. People stopping to think about an issue before they brainlessly post on Facebook would be a great thing.
*Censorship sucks because some of the best books I have read are formerly banned/censored books, such as Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.
4 comments:
amen, and amen.
Wow, Sarah. You should run for congress. Then you can stop all the stupid people from being stupid.
Thanks for the explanation! Also, one of my favorite children's books was (is?) banned...Little Black Sambo. Speaking of banned books..I had an investiagtor from mainland China, where the Bible is a banned book who investigated the church just for that reason (to learn about bible). I don't ever want to live in a place where things like that are banned!
I think the problem is mostly that congress was making the legislation without informing themselves about how the internet works. When they first set out to debate the issue, they didn't see a need to call any expert witnesses. This arrogance on the part of our elected representatives disgusts me. They were messing with the fabric of the internet without understanding how the internet works—I had Zach spend an hour explaining how the original bill was unintentionally destructive and I still don't entirely get it. They dropped one of the worst provisions before the protests, but the bill still would've allowed the attorney general, and possibly even private parties in some cases, to take down a site at the behest of a copyright holder before the owners of that site could have a chance to defend themselves. Every American is entitled to due process, and though the law was meant to target foreign sites, the language is such that it would basically be a sledgehammer when all that's really needed is a pair of tweezers.
In general I'm a fan of a certain amount of government regulation, but in the case of online piracy, I really think the answer lies with the content generators (record companies, production companies, etc). Piracy, unless you really know what you're doing, is a pain in the butt and often risky, too. Services like Netflix and Hulu show that if the product you offer is high quality and simple to use, people will pay for it, or at least watch your ads. People are starting to get used to the idea of accessing media on their own terms. As soon as media generating industries begin to recognize this, they'll start making money again.
I'm sorry it prevented you from doing your work, but if you take a look at this handy infographic, you'll see that the protest was in fact incredibly effective: http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/sopa-opera-update. Possibly Senator Reid would've postponed the vote anyway, but I'm sure this had a lot to do with the death of the senate bill.
As you can see, I feel strongly about this issue. If you have a chance, I'd highly recommend reading up on it a bit more. Sure, the battle over SOPA/PIPA is over, but the internet and censorship and copyright protection are probably going to be some of the most important problems of our time. Understanding how the internet works a little better will not only help you to fully appreciate and important resource but also show that stopping online piracy, while not a bad idea in theory, is actually really, really hard and possibly harmful if not done right in practice.
-Kayleigh
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