Today is a worldwide day of protest. Today, people who care about being able to use the Internet as a space where everyone can connect and share ideas, information and commerce, are protesting the proposed bills in Congress whose acronyms are, respectively, SOPA and PIPA (a nasty pair if ever there was one.). Here is a link to get more information about it (posted on Google‘s home page)
Most of the “big” sites are going dark (or grey) — to show support for the defeat of these bills.
While the original intent for both of the bills is good — to protect intellectual property and stop thieves from illegally downloading images and content to which they have no rights (which is truly a BIG problem) — the bills themselves are horribly written and would cause innocent people grievous harm. Congress needs to scrap both of these ill-conceived bills (one in the Senate and one in the House of Representatives) — and start over.
These bills not only “throw the baby out with the bath water” — they throw out the whole bath!
You will find tons of opinions online today about these bills. You may want to read a few and see for yourself. But please take one more step. Call your elected officials and tell them to vote against these bills. We the people can stop them if we speak out. Let’s.