Today is the official internet blackout day for the protest against SOPA and PIPA.
As you should have already noticed Wikipedia, Google, Reddit, Craigslist, EFF, Mozilla (Firefox), Torrentfreak and many, many more have joined in protest against those USA bills by blocking out their main pages and linking to videos and information about the bills. I will not attempt to explain as there's already enough information and you can learn more from the sites listed or simply googling it :)
But what I do want to discuss here is what is the real reason those bills have come about. Although we would all like to believe the reason is for shutting down websites, advertising networks and payment systems that infringe copyrights but when thinking about the payment systems we remember the very recent and very real attempt to shutdown a site like wikileaks. As you would have heard Visa, Mastercard and Paypal have all stopped supporting the payments that wikileaks was supposed to get from the donations that people would give to wikileaks via those services listed. Because of the services that existed in the US it would appear that the government has enough infolence on those in Visa, Mastercard and paypal to force them to shutdown the support for wikileaks.
In reality Wikileaks had done nothing wrong, they simply tell the truth leaked from within the government departments in the united states that should have been made public in the first place. Of course you probably also heard that anonymous hacking group had managed to retaliate at visa, mastercard and paypal because they feel that free speech should remain free on the internet and not censored. So we see these bills being proposed and supported by the most obvious players of the Hollywood entertainment industry, because of the very vague nature of the language used in those bills which is very heavily criticised by the many opposing companies and people I have a very real suspicion that there's something to do with wikileaks and wikileaks type of websites.
What do you think of SOPA/PIPA?
Do you think SOPA/PIPA is this a front for actually shutting down sites like wikileaks and ones that are similar in nature to wikileaks?
Let me know in the comments below.
