Ok, so I might be late in finding out about this but I am extremely timely in my discussion of it. The United States Congress will be voting on bills that have to do with the internet, copyright infringement, and generally censorship. These bills are called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act). These acts propose to "regulate" copyright infringement on the internet by allowing the Department of Justice to take legal action against sites (even sites outside United States' jurisdiction!!!!) that are infringing on copyright, or enabling/facilitating copyright infringement. After having identified these sites, the Attorney General could ban search engines from displaying results for those sites. THIS IS CENSORSHIP.
These bills, if enacted, could also allow for a maximum prison term of up to 5 years for people who participate in activities such as streaming, and who are caught 10 times in a period of 6 months. These bills will change everyone's daily life if enacted! We ALL engage in copyright infringement at some point or another (for example, if you post pictures, music, or videos on your blog without giving credit for them or paying for them), or we use sites that do. Even if I do not live in the United States it is obvious that I will still be affected since, as I mentioned earlier, they will take legal action against sites OUTSIDE U.S. JURISDICTION.
Sites that oppose these bills, such as Wikipedia, Reddit, icanhascheezburger, Mozilla, etc. will be protesting by holding 24-hour blackouts on January 18, 2012. The United States will vote on whether or not this will be enacted on January 24, 2012. In order to show that you are against these bills, there are several online petitions that can be signed for example https://donate.mozilla.org/page/s/sopa-pipa-petition, and you can just let as many people know about it as you can.
I feel that this is an important matter that concerns us all in a direct way and it cannot be allowed to happen.
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