Imagine a website where all information in the world is easily accessible by all people at all times. Oh, and also editable and therefore sometimes pretty much wrong.
That’s Wikipedia, the beautiful, and sometimes grossly inaccurate encyclopedia of the Internet. With just one website, somebody can quickly and successfully access whatever information on whatever topic they could ever be interested in!
Just try to name one other website that allows you to find information on the internet so quickly and efficiently.
But because the Internet is such a wonderful fairyland of free information, a terrible, awful, no good, very bad thing called sharing piracy happens.
What is piracy, nobody asked? Well, it’s kind of like stealing stuff. Except kind of not. It’s more like this:
Imagine you buy a chair. Then, somehow through the MAGIC OF TECHNOLOGY, you’re able to copy that chair and give it to a friend. Congrats, you just created an economy in which monetary transaction isn’t necessary to get the things that you need.
Sucks, doesn’t it?
But that’s basically piracy: copying stuff and giving it to other people so they don’t pay money for it. Sure, it’s not a good thing. After all, there are poor starving musicians out there who can’t afford to continue what they love doing because people aren’t paying for their music.
So the U.S. Government drafted up an idea called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. The intent of the bill is to protect intellectual property by giving the government the ability to block parts of the internet that it feels have violated copyrights. However, the wording of the bill actually just gives the government the ability to block out whatever website it wants. It ends up being an infringement on First Amendment rights, is Internet censorship, and will open up a hole in space and time and kill us all.
Therefore, some very large websites have united to “blackout” against this alleged internet censorship today by completely ceasing operations. Wikipedia is the most significant one, as millions of people every day trust it to give them information they so desperately need.
Today? You can’t even search for “booger.” (However, you can still get on Wikipedia to find information on SOPA.)
Another significant website that is down today is Reddit, where a huge amount of people spend their entire day in an attempt to feel popular (the rest of the world attempts this by blogging).
It’s really amazing to see entire websites take a break from their livelihood in order to make a statement and prove a point such as this.
Just try to name one other time that people have made such a grand statement in order to make a stand.
But the point remains: SOPA is a bit of a big deal. So today, while you freely surf the Internet, feel free to check out what SOPA actually is. Visit Google, or Wikipedia, or Reddit, and find out what petitions you can sign or who you can contact to fight against this bill.
Because residents of the internet have to fight for our right to party keep the Internet free.
Your Friend Joseph Craven Welcomes You To The GBOAT 
The dancing guy at the end saved this post.
That’s the only existing footage of me dancing.
The chair analogy- nailed it.
The dancing creepo- yikes.
Yeah, by the time I finished writing this and put up that photo, I instantly wanted everything on the web to be banned forever.
I want to hire you to caption everything ever.
Would I get dental? I won’t take this job offer unless I get dental.
I could give you a new toothbrush and a package of floss every six months. Would that work? If you’d like the extra-special dental coverage, I could also poke your gums with a pointy mental stick and tell you to do a better job brushing and flossing.*
*True story: I was in the dentists chair and the not-dentist who does the cleaning — what are those called? I can’t remember — stabbed my gums with that deadly metal stick thing and said “Oh, your gums are bleeding.” Had I not been in a chair with that deadly object in my mouth, I would have said “Here, let me stab you with a sharp object — I bet you’ll bleed, too.” Instead, I exercised wisdom and said nothing.
You know at the beginning of movies when they play the commercial to deter pirating? The one that’s like, “You wouldn’t steal a car, so why steal a movie?” Here’s the thing: if I could DOWNLOAD a car, then OF COURSE I would steal one. That’s all I have to say about it…
I like to download those ads, just to enjoy the irony of the situation.
I think Ask Jeeves is just Ask now. I mean, it’s still not Google, but it’s cute to see Ask trying to improve its image by eliminating the needlessly creepy butler.
But, uh, yeah, DIE SOPA. Since everyone else is saying it.
Don’t say any of that about Ask Jeeves on Twitter. He’ll get his feelings hurt. I learned that from experience.
Thank you for this post. I kept seeing SOPA everywhere I didn’t have a fat clue what it was. It sounded like either food or a male loofah. Now I know.
It’s like if you combined food with a male loofah, then made it exponentially more dangerous to liberties. Basically, at least.
I was pretty lost about SOPA myself. Am I right to gather that a) we should probably censor metallica fans (out of principle), and b) people aren’t using AltaVista anymore?
A) By now, I think society has moved to a point where we just ignore Metallica fans in the first place, so we don’t even need censorship.
B) I still rock Alta Vista Babel Fish like a champion when I need something translated poorly.