SOPA and Protect IP are bills currently being pushed through the American congress in order to "prevent piracy" on the internet - although it is effectively censorship. The latter being milder than the first if SOPA fails. With these bills it will give american corporations powers to sue sites into the ground that hold their copyrighted content without license, meaning that many sites, such as YOUTUBE that contain huge amounts of music and video content not authorised by the companies, could be shut down, as a preventative measure rather than restricting each and every user - it would be impossible. The wording of these acts is sufficiently ambiguous that even sites such as ebay could be shut down as they contain physical goods such as fake clothes. Huge companies, such as Nike, Rolex, EA, Nintendo as well as lobby groups are influencing congress to put this into place to take away your rights on the internet to publish content, if these were passed, even linking to an upload site on a blog such as megaupload could result in a lawsuit against you, completely overrulling fairness of use and freedom of the press and information for every person. You can sign an online petition to hopefully prevent this happening and the snowball effect of rights being taken away continuing. This will only continue if people are apathetic and if we let them.

Online Petition : http://americancensorship.org/

TotalBiscuit's Video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhwuXNv8 ... AAAAAAAQAA

Another explanation : http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/

Infographic : http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html

Please support this and sign the petition in order to prevent the rights and liberties of you and millions of others being taken away to feed financial greed.

P.S. Please correct any mistakes in what i have said here if it isn't actually true, this is merely my understanding of it and I do not want others to get the wrong end of the stick.

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[SpA]ZombieStalin : For a little more clarifaction...

Spacecarrot : how man wham do you need for awesome people? 42.

The people who'll be dicussing all this wont really have a grasp on what the internet is, and with companies backed with stupid amounts of money, they'll just brute force push for censorship, and censorship is a slippery slope.

Signed :O

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"There is a simple, logical explanation... and there is nothing under the bed.”

Worth mentioning

https://www.accessnow.org/page/s/just-say-no-to-acta

and this one isn't just for america..

https://www.torproject.org/

http://www.truecrypt.org/


I recommend everyone to use Tor, at least. Its browser is a kinda like a modified firefox with https-everywhere included. Stay safe peeps.

(And see you around the tf2 servers, now that my BA-thesis is soon coming to an end)