Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

[Dirtbag59]

Originally Posted by mooby

Well, if this bill passes, life is gonna suck way more exponentially.

I don't believe it will pass. Granted it's a very real threat.

SOPA opponents may go nuclear and other 2012 predictions | Privacy Inc. - CNET News

Ironic seeing who is writing this article but nonetheless it brings up a good point. Anyway bottom line is that Google alone could be enough to stand up to the 120 or so other companies trying to get SOPA passed. You can then go on to include the likes of Twitter, YouTube (owned by Google), Linkedin, EBay, Amazon, and Yahoo among others that will start their own push to oppose the bill assuming they haven't already. IIRC Facebook has opposed the bill participating in a letter to what I believe is a Supreme Court justice but Zuckerberg has remained publicly neutral.

Is Facebook Selling Out The Internet? | Techdirt

In newspapers across the country today, a who's who of massively successful entrepreneurs are asking Congress not to pass SOPA or PROTECT IP. On the list of people signing:

• Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, Opsware, and Andreessen Horowitz
• Mitchell Baker, co-founder of Mozilla Firefox
• Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
• Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square
• Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch
• David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo
• Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
• Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post
• Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube
• Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive
• Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX
• Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist
• Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
• Biz Stone, co-founder of Obvious and Twitter
• Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikimedia
• Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter
• Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo

That said, there is one name that's oddly missing: Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook did already come out against the bill, but Mark's name is not on here. Given the list of other names on here, there's no doubt he was asked, but for whatever reasons has chosen not to speak out. In asking around, it appears that he made the decision not to stick his neck out on this one, even as the company agrees that SOPA is bad.

Not to mention the majority of people don't like the idea of turning the internet into a legal minefield where clicking on the wrong site can result in litigation or termination of internet service. Plus keep in mind that parents have limited control of what their kids do online.