Nov 17th: As of now the US Congress still hasn’t voted on this law, so if you haven’t contacted congress yet, you still have time to contact them, and you should!
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has contacted congress, I would just like to ask for one more favor, contact congress again, one last time, more info here.
You might have been wondering what that STOP CENSORSHIP bar at the top of the page was, well, I’ll explain it to you.
Basically, today the US congress is trying to pass a new law called PROTECT IP to help protect the bigwigs in Hollywood, but if this law passes, the internet will never be the same.
The US government will be able to blacklist any site that has copyrighted content posted onto it; this includes content posted by users who aren’t even staff of the website, such as forums. You could also go to jail for uploading “copyrighted” content such as a song or anything else that gets taken down from youtube for copyright notices.
This is a big deal, I’m not exagerating this. Big sites such as Mozilla and reddit are taking part in this protest even. If you live in the US, do your part and contact congress NOW.
If you own a blog or website, this should matter to you, this is no laughing matter.
Ad:
the law will pass.
The internet needs more censorship honestly.
If you think about it like a rational, mature adult you’ll realize that at the very least things online need to be screened.
It’s not right that you can search Google and in 3 minutes find videos of teenage psychopaths literally murdering an old man in Ukraine. Or that anyone can anonymously post anything they want, such as death threats, libelous statements, or illegal pornography of coerced young people, and not face society’s legal system for breaking the law.
We’re not talking about a government wanting to stop you from downloading your favorite anime here. The goal is to limit the ability of people to post things that are illegal. It would only enforce the laws that currently exist. For example, you can’t put a giant projector screen in your front yard and play videos of real people being murdered. Why can people do it online?
You can call me a prude, but anyone who thinks it’s necessary for any member of the public to see these vile, horrific things is a jaded, psychotic, immature fool.
There is no such thing as anonymity on the internet. If you do something Illegal the government can easily track you down. This is a law being lobbied in by hollywood in the name of profits.
@Disagreeable (nice name, ever consider using your regular nickname?)
SOPA is not about accessing “vile imagery” as you put it, it’s about stopping online piracy. However it is going about it the wrong way.
Also, there is no way the internet will EVER be the perfect world you hope it to be. Things will still exist that you consider to be offensive and vile, because to another person they are not. And these sorts of things cannot be stopped worldwide. However, things like child porn HAVE been stomped out (not fully, but actions have been taken) by search engines like google.
Also, I had listened to the talks that went on today, and a LOT of people who are the decision makers on this act know very little. One older gentleman assumed that typing “free J Edgar move” into google, and clicking a YouTube link that in turn directed users to a movie download site was Google and YouTube making it easy to find a download version of the movie. However, I tried that very same thing and it does not take you to the movie, it takes you to a spam site that tries to make you fill out a survey. It’s still shady, and needs to be cleaned up by YouTube, but it was not an easy way to fund a movie for free. So their little attempt to make Google and YouTube look bad was a fail.
If you’ve been to 4Chan at any point in the last 5 years you’ll agree that the internet needs more oversight. Unless you’re a pervert?
You know what? Honestly? My fucking cat has been meowing at me nonstop for the last twenty minutes and I really got annoyed and just was being a miserable prick. I don’t even care about internet censorship. Fuck it. Carry on, and fuck D.C.
as long as youre talking about washington and not SEGAs last console, ill agree with you on that one 🙂
Today? Its a bit late to start now
so SEGAbits is DOOMED
no censorchip
Disagreeable, 4Chan and the rest of the internet are two very, very different things.
The internet is the Wild West of our age, lawless and full of weirdos.
Also, funnily enough I’ve been on the internet longer than 4Chan and I’ve known about it for years and I’ve still never bothered to go onto the site.
The words freedom ring a bell to everyone? nah I guess no cause no one is free to know what that is… Fuck cencorship and the oppression of all these laws for the so called “good” Censorship should be on the news then, on your congress, on our parliament, actually on everything! Life is as is, you can’t alter it. You can force it actually but that is so wrong for many reasons. You are having a conversation and analyze things based on a mistake! So everything you speak of is wrong.. The mistake is society its self! They might censor the beating of an old man by teens but the world hasn’t been purified, this will be on the news, plus no one cares about goodness so they might prevent that but their reasons are for something else, they gain something!
In the end a child, teenager in specific if is raised in conciousness then all this will be filtered.. This worked for me 100%. The problem is not the uncensored stuff on internet. This reminds me the issue on games: videogames are responsible for violence! Don’t blame videogames blame the individuals and of course society, which is concluded by us!!
Eeks. I hope this doesn’t go through 🙁
“It’s not right that you can search Google and in 3 minutes find videos of teenage psychopaths literally murdering an old man in Ukraine. Or that anyone can anonymously post anything they want, such as death threats, libelous statements, or illegal pornography of coerced young people, and not face society’s legal system for breaking the law.”
Images and videos like that are available (if kept updated) in… damn, I forgot what they’re called. Book depository? Anyway, they’re open to the public, and it’s been that way for *years*, decades before the existence of the net.
I’m all for people “protecting” their access to specific content (goatsee, anyone?), but you utilize the same way you lock the door to your house when you go out. The issue here is regulation. Government regulation. It’s not even a speck that one law where you have to reword every five sentences or limit quotes in articles you used as a source online.
Think of it along the lines of when you have politicians who wanted to “protect” children from M rated video games. If you think that was the only reason, then you are exactly the naive person these same politicians want on their side.
In any “protect” law you come, look both ways.
And if anything shocked you when first logging onto 4chan, then, shit. What the hell kind of parents did you have? I grew up on Faces of Death and look how I turned out! 😀