19 Jan Pro SOPA & PIPA? Not quite, but you can see their point…

███████ everything ████ ████ ██ is █ ██████ ██ fine ████ ███ ███. ███’█ ██████. The ██ ███ █ government █████ ███ knows ██████ best ███ ██.

I’m still not sure about how I truly feel about SOPA and PIPA – both pose a variety of pro’s and con’s toward modern life and business as we know. However, seeing content like the above re-written for our naive minds to handle is nothing new. My good friend Kevin posted an intersing thought on Facebook this morning:

SOPA is nothing new. History has taught us well. With the invention of the printing press, everyone could print and it allowed newspapers, encouraged thought, and then gave way to dissent. It was regulated, books and newspapers were banned. We now have safe books and newspapers.

Same thing happened with radio; anyone with a two-way radioset could broadcast, it allowed small groups of rebellion to form and encouraged thought and then dissent. Rules were put in place, radio now belongs to an elite few playing safe messages and Top 40 songs.

Along came television – it was regulated pretty much straightaway and now we have safe programmes we know we can let our children watch without giving it a thought.

Fast forward to 2012 and we have SOPA. Thing is, the Internet does not belong to an elite few (like print, radio and television before us). The Internet, and its collective power, is bigger than governments and political leaders. It is faster than any form of media before us, much bigger and more influential. More is at stake. Our lifestyles and lines of communications are at stake.

Thing is, do we trust ourselves?

We’ll do you? Personally I’m amazed that we’ve even got this far without internet censorship – seriously it’s been almost 20 years in the western world since the introduction of the internet. I’d be completely for it but there’s some key reason’s why I’m not – PIPA won’t stop piracy and SOPA will cripple publishers & the internet economy.

PIPA: Pirates are smart – they’ve always been one step ahead. This won’t change a thing. New domain, new server. Heard of UserNet?
SOPA: Will I still be able to write my own tailored description on ebay? Write this blog post like this?

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Truthfully I don’t have the answer. I don’t think anyone outside of governments does. I do however get some sort of comfort in the sense that the people co-oridnating these law’s know things that we’ll never.