SOPA and PIPA (ConceptTopic, 8)

From Compile Worlds

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, the Protect-IP Act, are two pieces of legislation currently attempted to be being pushed through... whatever it is that lets the USA makes its laws. As you can imagine from the names, the legitimate intention was to counter piracy, which is fine and all, but...

They're worded horribly. And as a consequence, ISPs are required to block any site that they suspect may be potentially infringing copyright. And the blocking takes place at the DNS level, so a single copyrighted work uploaded by a user to YouTube or deviantART or any other site like that, intentionally or otherwise, would take the entire site down. Even worse, according to the word of the bills, copyright infringement would be taking place even if a site was merely linking to an infringing site.

What this essentially means is that any website allowing submissions from the general public, that are then displayed to the public without requiring approval from the site owners, would be blocked in the USA under SOPA and/or PIPA. Even Compile Worlds, which has an invite-only system, would cease to exist since we have copyrighted images of Puyo characters on here, regardless of the fact that those are currently covered by fair use.

Basically, the only websites that would be left would be static websites built entirely by one person or company. They would not be able to link to any other websites that they didn't also own, for fear of the link target being blocked and then their own site being blocked via the link-to rule. Web2.0 would cease to exist, and it wouldn't even be a reversion to Web1.0, because as crappy as that was it at least had external links! Your Internet access charge would simply become a waste of money.

List of sites that went on strike on Jan 18th, 2012

Full blackout

Special theming

External links

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