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A few weeks back you probably remember Google plastering a black band across its logo (as if it were mourning the loss of Caesar) and sites such as Wikipedia shutting down to fight SOPA and PIPA (not the future queen's sister). Due to massive public response the government gave the bill a reprieve to be re-adjusted because in its most recent form it amounts to little more than censorship at the fingertips of Big Brother.
Days later, in an unrelated move the FBI arrested Kim Dotcom, the main man behind Megavideo and Megaupload, taking down those sites and arresting a number of people involved with the venture. Why did this happen? Because Megavideo is a den of illegal copyrighted material. What's odd is that Megavideo deletes files that violate copyright when they are contacted to do so. However, Megavideo does not incorporate any search functionality in their site so the only way to find a particular file or video is to get a link off of a third party website.
In this way websites like Sidereel.com aren't breaking any laws as they're not uploading or downloading or posting any illegal material, they are simply providing a link to that material. Some sites such as ALLUC.org are founded on a legal loophole. While Megavideo is willing to remove copyrighted material when notified the FBI still raided them and the site was shut down. If this happened, then why are SOPA and PIPA even up for discussion? They're not needed.
In fact the Megavideo takedown resulted in the pre-government shutdown of VideoBB, Fileserve and a number of other sites that, while they may contain some pirated material, were also the homes of perfectly legal file sharing practices. Filesonic, for instance, only allows users to download files that they uploaded; the sharing capabilities are entirely shut down in response to their expectation that government action could be imminent. There are obviously laws on the books that do exactly what SOPA and PIPA are ideally designed to do and what Congress had been lobbied to believe that they would do.
At this point it's hard to view SOPA and PIPA as anything other than a real world manifestation of an internet meme (I heard you like copyright protection laws in your copyright protection laws, dawg). When these bills are returned to Congress I suggest a further public campaign against them, because there are already laws in place that make them unnecessary, which tells us one thing, dear readers, SOPA and PIPA are only about money and censorship and in the long run are a horrible venture for the public that we are in danger of imposing upon ourselves through our elected officials so lazy and ignorant that they never contacted experts in the field they were attempting to pass laws on when designing the bill to understand the applicational effects of the bill in the real world. Take the laws to the extreme and we could see sites like Facebook banned in the US because someone had posted a picture that had the trademarked golden arches of a McDonald's in the background.
Here we are, still at the dawn of the information age and the threat of silence looms, yet we have no one to blame but us, for we silence ourselves.
/rant
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