SOPA, Or the Stop Online Piracy Act. Is an act by the US government in which, They could basically censor the internet. For lack of a better word They would be able to Block the DNS (Domain Name System) servers of foreign websites, That were even minorly infringing on US Copyright holders rights. This could intern cause Major sites like Wikipedia to be severed or removed permanently from the web.

On January 18th, Major websites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Google, Blacked out for 24 hours, and instead posted images of what could become of the Internet if this bill should pass.  Over 7000 smaller sites including Nurk joined in the rally to stop SOPA, and on January 19th 2012 Wikipedia reported that over 162 million people had contacted congress to protest SOPA. Thanks to our efforts on January 20th 2012 Congress announced that SOPA had been  ”Shelved” so to speak, Because the sponsor Lamar smith postponed the senate committee reading, because his home state of Texas was joining the Anti-SOPA movement.

One might say that if this bill passes, Free Speech Online Is Dead. but again SOPA supporters might argue that SOPA doesn’t kill free speech, It Censors It from copyright infringers. So that leads us back to the question of weather or not SOPA supports or Hurts Free speech. To be honest yes, Yes it does. If everyone online followed copyright laws to the letter, There Would be no internet.

If your reading this right now, your most likely fearing SOPA and the idea of no internet. So if you would like to keep the internet free and open to all users, Please join the fight for free speech online at wikipedia and anywhere else you can, Call your senator, Tell your governor, Speak to your congressmen! To resolve this problem we need to go to it; Right at Congresses doorstep.

As it is SOPA is lying dormant, waiting for a sponsor to read it for the senate, and many people have a stated goal to stop it. To get the ball rolling Please contact your senator and tell him your thoughts on the matter. In fact on January 18 2012, So many people did it, that the senate website was unable to accommodate  the amount of requests and was down for over 6 hours. Thanks to your support we can protect the internet for generations to come. Thanks for reading.

To learn more about SOPA & its sister act PIPA, visit one of the following websites to show your support:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOPA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CongressLookup?new=yes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act