Provisions in SOPA act would make almost every single internet user a criminal

[Mike_Yates]

Provisions in the SOPA act would make merely LINKING to copyrighted material is a felony crime punishable by five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Also, the website that contains the infringing link is taken down.

http://whydyoueatthat.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/why-sopa-is-stupid/

Can you name a single internet user whom has not done this?

 

[Love_Puppy]

When the internet starts to suck, I'll turn it off.

 

[JBCorbell]

Coming out of moms basement now that your internet is threatened?

You finally woke up and smelled a little reality! Congratulations.

 

[Frizzle_Fry]

We live in a police state...what did you expect?

 

[great lover]

While these laws will make such acts more illegal (and therefore reduce infringement), they’re doing something much, much more important: helping dismantle DNS and the internet as we know it. And that’s something that we firmly support and can stand by.

You see, back in the day, if you wanted to get online and access electronically-stored information like digitized photographs, electronic bulletin boards, and informational databanks, there was only one thing you needed: a telephone number. You’d simply fire up your favorite telecommunications program (mine was Telix), have it dial that phone number, and after a refreshing symphony of beeps and hisses, you were online.

Each phone number transported you to a quaint, peaceful community that was almost entirely self-sufficient. There was no “hyperlinking” between systems: you simply wrote down the phone number, signed-off of the current system, and then dialed into the new system. And let me tell you, there are few experiences in life that can parallel the utter bliss of discovering a new phone number and a new electronic resource.

And then the Information Superhighway – and its tightly integrated Domain Name System – came along, decimating these peaceful, independent communities. The bulletin boards of old were ground up and churned in the giant “dot com” machine, leaving an interconnected web of domain names. There’s no more “going online” – you’re already online – and if you want to access an electronic resource, you can use a “domain name” like google.com.

Domain names are highly confusing in that they not only describe what the electronic resource is, but where it is as well. Nothing else in the world works like this for obvious reasons. Could you imagine the complete confusion in day-to-day things like getting a phone number? Is that “jenny eighty-six dot com” or “jenny eighty-six dot net”? We would be in complete chaos.

SOPA and PROTECT-IP offer hope in returning to the golden age of telecommunications, and to the days before the Information Superhighway polluted the online culture with this domain name nonsense. Let the Domain Name System a natural death and prepare yourself for the Internet Protocol Number (IPN) renaissance. All you need to do is start a notebook that lists electronic resource names and their corresponding IPN. And let the first entry in your notebook be


We can only hope that our legislators introduce common sense guidelines to ban HTTP (and HTML) as well so we can all return to the more sensible GOPHER standard.

 

[Mike_Yates]

These oppressive laws/examples of corporate fascism have inspired some Americans to move to other countries in search of freedom and privacy.

The United States is no longer the world's shining example of freedom and prosperity.