What is going on in America? First, the House passes a bill (luckily it’s never passed the Senate) to regulate every female uterus from Maine to Hawaii — and they’ve introduced a number of bills to attempt to cut any aid funding to any country that allows abortions. Then, they pass a defense authorization bill that allows for picking up US Citizens under the guise of “terrorism”, shipping them to our off-shore penal colony in Guantanamo, Cuba and holding them in perpetuity should they desire to do so. But now, they’re trying to go way overboard in terms of regulation of our internet in such a way that it could cripple our freedom of speech.
While that seems a bit serious, there is a very humorous and hypocritical actions by the bills sponsors and co-sponsors themselves. You see, they’re absolutely guilty under the ACT of what they’re proposing to stop. Take a look through their websites and you’ll see that they’ve used graphics, art and photos that are the “property” of other people and have not “sought their permission” to use those assets in promoting themselves. If PIPA or SOPA were law today, any one of those people whose permission was not sought could force their entire website off the net, not just force them to remove the offending graphic.
This type of “censorship” would make it next to impossible to find needed information, all under the guise of anti-piracy legislation. To protest the passage of any of these onerous bills, a number of sites either went dark completely yesterday, or masked some of their content from view. Big named sites like Wikipedia, WordPress, and even Google participated, as did this site.
Related articles
- Check out this wonderful infographic (americancensorship.org)
- Censorship? Say What?!!! (parkerplatform.com)
- Internet Censorship (ourlovelywords.wordpress.com)
