Anyone protesting the Internet bills that are to be voted on in in Congress?

[Hellow]

The Internet blackout yesterday wasn't just Wikipedia - it was a giant protest that many major sites took part in. I took part in it myself - all the websites I administered were a part of that blackout yesterday. It had great effect - support for the bills in Congress dropped off a cliff.

SOPA & PIPA are horrendous threats to the freedom and liberty of the Internet for the second-largest Internet-using nation in the world. It would be worse than the censorship in China (the Great Firewall of China, as it's called), because of the fact that so many huge websites and web corporations are based in the US. The government could say that a site is illegal and have it shut down, and no one could do much of anything about it. If they moved overseas, then the government could enforce a censor on that site so no one in the US could view it.

These bills do *nothing* to correct problems that exist on the Internet. And, in my honest opinion, the government should just stop trying. You can't control something that knows no geographical or political boundaries unless you can get every government in the world in on a movement, and that's something that has never happened in the history of humanity.

Speaking from the perspective of a computer network engineer, the limit of control that any entity has, stops at the routers that you directly control. Beyond that, it's a wild world. And unless we want to become something similar to a dictatorship, the government can't directly control every.. I can't remember, some number in the thousands of submarine cable landings in the US. Mostly because they're all owned by independent ISPs - some of which are international - and there would be fire and brimstone if the government tried to enforce control over them.

I'm not saying that the government shouldn't persecute computer systems crackers or child predators (something that has been hugely over-dramatized by the media), I fully support the government doing that, but SOPA & PIPA were going way too far with the notion that a controlled Internet is a safe Internet.

EDIT: Here's some links for you guys.
A technical overview of SOPA & PIPA: http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/techn...-sopa-and.html
Help the Electronic Frontier Foundation (great guys over there) stop SOPA & PIPA: http://blacklist.eff.org/
A one-page guide to SOPA & PIPA by the EFF (It's a PDF): https://www.eff.org/sites/default/fi...age-SOPA_0.pdf

[Karen]

Many of the politicians are now realing they should back off of this bill, and are no longer supporting it.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/19/tech/s...tml?hpt=hp_bn3

[smokey the elder]

Somewhat related...I know that people should pay to acquire media. But the way I understand fair use from a layperson's perspective, once you own the media in question, you can convert it to any other medium. One example is a CD to an .mp3 to load on your .mp3 player. However, I know a person who bought a Blu-Ray (TM) and tried to rip a copy to play on his computer but a code blocked it. Does this violate fair-use?

I like how many movie suppliers are now providing a digital copy of movies in the Blu-Ray (TM) sets.

[Lady's Human]

Just FYI, SOPA and PIPA have been shelved.