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Youth Are Awesome, commonly referred to as YAA, is a blog written by youth for youth. YAA provides the youth of Calgary a place to amplify their voices and perspectives on what is happening around them. Youth Are Awesome is a program of Youth Central.

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HomeUncategorizedSOPA and PIPA? NOPE-A.

SOPA and PIPA? NOPE-A.

It’s been all over the news and it’s been especially big on the internet. I see resistance to SOPA and PIPA in social media, and other places on the internet that share information. I don’t like SOPA and PIPA either. Yay.

What exactly is SOPA and PIPA?
Well, m’dears, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was a bill introduced into the United States Congress earlier in October 2011. The PROTECT IP Act/PIPA (cute-sounding, eh?) OR, the mouthful  –> Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 is just a counterpart of SOPA that was introduced to the United States Senate.

Together, these two bills aim to fight online copyright infringement, particularly through foreign websites.The issue of online piracy has always been an issue with media companies. They’ve persisted in suing individual users, tried to shut down internet service providers, and worked with the government to close down domains. However, that’s had little effect on the ongoing copyright infringements. Originally, if the bill passed, the U.S. Department of Justice could require internet service providers to block the domain names of infringing sites. For example, if Wikipedia had an article that linked to copyrighted material on any site, then SOPA and PIPA could potentially close Wikipedia down (NOOOOOOOOOO).

Basically, the head honchos of big corporations don’t like people stealing their stuff, so the US Senate with PIPA and the US Congress with SOPA are going to battle piracy with a whole boatload of restrictions on internet activity.

Who’s Against This?
Me and probably anyone else that uses the internet to a great extent for homework or entertainment, so you too. But don’t get me wrong, stealing and piracy is bad… I’m not saying that people should go on a rampage and download music, movies, and games. We should be respectful of people’s hard work that went into making these things. I’m just saying that the US’ actions are way to excessive for dealing with this.

I honestly don’t care who’s in support of this bill. I don’t think people in the House of Representatives or Senate realize the extent of their decisions on the free flow of information. Viral videos on YouTube would technically have to be taken down and poor Ray William Johnson would have to shut down his channel. Those videos of cute kitties doing cute things will be taken down. And oh man, If I can’t get my quick information right off of Wikipedia in a last minute effort to finish a project, I will be so mad. I know my Tumblr friends would be sad pandas because SOPA probably would’ve annihilated the spread of information on there, no notes, no re-blogging, nope. There’s all this talk about how the internet is free place for people to learn and accumulate knowledge, yeh–no. Not after this bill, it won’t be. It’s crazy bread…the US Constitution is such a big advocator for free speech and expression and now they choose to implement this bill? This is censorship at its finest — basically, they’re pulling a Communist China on us.

So back to what I was saying. Who is against this? Well here are a few prominent organizations that want to stomp on this bill:

  • Google blacked out its logo and posted a message on its home page that said “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the Web!”
  • “Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge” came from Wikipedia which closed down for 24 hours with a blacked out logo
  • 4chan
  • Craigslist
  • Tumblr
  • WordPress (the site that supports Youth Are Awesome’s blog page O_o…things just got more serious)
  • Mozilla
  • Flickr
  • reddit
  • Vimeo
  • FailBlog
  • MineCraft
  • The Oatmeal (They’ve set up their own funny way to oppose SOPA/PIPA, I’m pretty sure it’s only intended for a mature audience so shield your eyes, younglings. But big kiddies, here y’arr)
  • A whole bunch more, check them out here. The list doesn’t end…
  • Also, if you want to join the strike or check it out, go to http://sopastrike.com/.

Anyways, my fingers are sore and I seriously don’t want this bill to go through, seeing as I’m not ready to quit the internet at all. However, it might be a possibility, “On Jan 17, SOPA’s sponsor said the bill will be discussed in early February. There are signs PIPA may be debated on the Senate floor next week.” <– Straight from Wikipedia. What would we do without it? -emotional moment-.

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