User blog comment:Caring16/Stop SOPA before it takes are fandom away!/@comment-3987368-20140318105032

Wow, I return from inactivity and apparently some people are freaking out about SOPA again. Let's make this clear: SOPA is done for. Obama already made the veto threat years ago and then congress shelved the bill. (See here). It was unpopular amongst the masses because it was a corporate scheme to effectively give control of the media to the corporations at the expense of personal freedom to act. At its core, SOPA was a government bill that the corporations were urging congress to pass but was stopped due to mass protest. Anyone remember the Wikipedia Black-Out?

Let's not kid ourselves though: copyright infringement and online piracy are both problems. They're problems in every industry that seeks to put out their products and then get ripped off because people don't want to pay? Whether it's a download of a movie or theft of intellectual property, it's gonna piss someone off. Ask yourself: Do I wanna buy the DVD of a movie when I can torrent it for free online, use HDMI to watch it on my TV and see all the extras on YouTube? Typically, the answer is "No" since people typically don't want to pay money for things they can otherwise get for free. It's this kind of attitude that cause the companies to respond with aggressive and unconstitutional measures like SOPA, and later CIPA and PIPA. Of course, I'm not gonna defend them for doing so. Yes, online piracy is an issue but it's not an excuse to come up with illegitimate measures to combat it and try to censor the free internet for the purpose of what is borderline illegal profiteering.

Let me just tell you one major reason why this isn't going to work:

I mentioned with the Wikipedia Black-Out example above, but they weren't the only company against the move. Microsoft opposed it, as did Amazon and Google. For a larger list, see here. Why does this matter? Well, it's the issue of being "voluntary" in this particular case. What we're facing is not SOPA itself, but rather, legislative parts of SOPA that the original starters favored and they're basically asking the companies to enforce things themselves since the American congress won't due to voter backlash. So if these companies opposed the original incarnation of SOPA for monitoring when the government was behind it, why the hell would they volunteer to do it themselves?

To the blog creator, I don't mean to sound like a dick but I suggest that you do some more research before going around to multiple wikis (I have seen this happen) and copy-pasting the same blog around to "warn" users about something that is going to happen when you don't truly know what that something is. I don't claim to be a legal expert, cause I'm not. I'm just a normal guy who likes his entertainment and wants to protect it but also look out for interest that are in good faith, which SOPA is not. The best thing to do about things like this is to keep yourself aware of the situation by reading (thanks for the DA link Carrot, I found it nicely informative) and keeping engaged in the issue. Like in a fire, the worst possible thing to do is panic. Still to everyone, remember that if you don't support the industry, you aren't going to have one.