These four intriguing letters seem to be the recent buzz in social media and the internet as a whole but to be honest, other than knowing that SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act, I haven’t had that much knowledge why it’s getting the attention of more and more people. From my half-baked understanding SOPA is meant to put some sort of control over online content and exchanges and the proliferation of materials that some authorities think violate the intellectual property rights of people who claim ownership on things such as music, software, and books just to name a few. And based on this alone, as expected of me, I may be leaning on the side of those who support SOPA. So far, I’m yet to see someone on my Twitter timeline who has the same opinion as mine – other than the very people who want this implemented.
Today, Wikipedia.org joins the growing number of people who are against SOPA (and the complementary PIPA or Protect Intellectual Property Act bill) – in a couple of hours it will black out its whole website to protest SOPA. Recently, there have been strong calls for subscribers to pull out of GoDaddy.com (which incidentally is my domain host) after it declared its support to the controversial bills.
So where do I stand in this issue? Anyone who has been lurking/reading my blog posts probably knows the answer. I am anti-piracy. I try hard to be one even if it has costs me to miss on learning new software, catching up on new movies, and possessing a copy of the latest hit music. And yes, my advocacy and commitment to this has made people, especially my friends, scratch their heads in disbelief.
But perhaps people who are against SOPA and PIPA have a valid reason behind their outcry and so I think I will have to step back a bit and learn what these are before I declare a hundred percent support to whatever I believe in (or will believe in next). In the next few weeks I’ll try to absorb as much knowledge as possible and see if there’s a rational explanation why one will have the right to use (AND SHARE) something that is not his (or hers) or something that he did not pay for. Let’s see.
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Mood: 4/10 Honks! (I think I’m having fever. Good reason for grammatical errors.)
Marcus Can Blog 