Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

[Daseal]

I wanted to start a discussion about this bill here because it could profoundly impact everyone here on The Warpath. SOPA could cause a significant change to how we browse the internet in general and be particularly devestating for online forums, YouTube, Facebook, and Google. This bill essentially takes due process away from the site owners and starts us down a slippery slope that could lead us even farther down the internet censorship rabbit hole.

On the surface, most people would not object to stopping piracy. I respect intellectual property and think that the owners of that property should get a fair price for their goods. I feel as if many of the media-based industries are pretty far behind the curve, which contributes to the piracy -- but that subject is for another day.

The real issue comes with the fact that a site owner is going to be held liable for everything that happens on their site. For instance, if someone started posting links for illegal Redskins gear, live streams for the games, YouTube videos with the skins in it -- Matty is responsible. His site will get shut down and he has no real recourse to get that reversed. It requires either ridiculous amounts of moderation or mods having to approve every post before it is allowed through. Please think of Mrs. Smootsmack. She would never see her husband again!

If they are found in violation they will be removed from the DNS servers. That means if thewarpath was in violation, you would be forwarded to a page saying this site is suspect if pirating. However, instead of typing The Warpath: Redskins Fan Site you typed The Warpath: Redskins Fan Site The Warpath would still come up. Thus this would make 3rd party DNS servers the norm.

My explanation was far from eloquent, if you're interested in reading more about it Toms Hardware did an excellent write up of how it would affect their site. If this topic hits a sensitive spot, like it does for me, I suggest you reach out to your politicians. Many of us are outraged by this and GoDaddy took a huge hit because of their support of this bill, that they were both responsible for helping to draft and coincidentally exempt from the ramifications.

Save Tom's, Stop SOPA