Displaying items by tag: PIPA

I love old sayings. One reason is that some are just plain funny, but another is that so many are true. In this case the old saying is “If you squeeze something too tight it will slip out between your fingers”. This is exactly what is happening with the tight internet controls that are being worked on right now.  As Google, Twitter and others are working on hiding dissenting topics and tweets that governments do not want visible in their countries people like the TOR (The Onion Router) Project are working to get around those restrictions.

Lately there has been a large focus on the Internet and that it is becoming less of the open communications community that people believe that it should be. We have watched as laws like SOPA, PIPA, Open, ACTA and others have been proposed on the basis of protecting Intellectual Property. Because of the push to protect corporate interests it is often felt that the big entertainment companies are behind these laws. If the truth be told many of them are behind these laws, however we cannot remove responsibility from the government in these cases.

Unless you have been under a rock for the past few months you know that the big media companies have been pushing the copyright laws quite heavily. A pair of very dangerous laws call the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) were just dropped (for now) on after a very large Internet protest that ended up with many major sites blacking out for the day. We were also involved in that protest as the vague wording of the law was terrifying to say the least.

There is an old saying that nothing is coincidental. When something happens at that can affect another outcome it has happened for a reason. A good case in point is the recent “take down” of the site MegaUploads. This site has been accused of copyright infringement (criminal copyright infringement no less) and a few other very serious crimes.  The story has been all over the internet and many are standing up and saying that this one issue is proof that SOPA is not needed and that the current laws are good enough… um are we so sure that this is what this little event truly shows, or is meant to show?