As anyone who used the internet on Wednesday quickly learned, there was a massive online protest against SOPA/PIPA. First, click here to answer what is SOPA/PIPA?
This site and other including reddit, Wikipedia, and Bilerico shut down for the day showing pages urging you to contact your elected representatives. Now, many are claiming success as both the House and the Senate have postponed voting on the bills.
I did not take the decision to shut down lightly. Many had reservations about shutting down as they were going to lose a day’s worth of advertising revenue. My advertising revenue is so small, one day’s loss honestly is not even noticeable. I hesitated to shut down my site as this is a form of protest that can only be done rarely. If a bunch of sites shut down next month to protest something else it would not be nearly as effective or dramatic. It would be overused. However, I feel strongly that SOPA and PIPA are significantly flawed and had to be stopped.
However, now that the protest is over, was it successful? I would argue it was only modestly successful in accomplishing what it needed to accomplish. First, the bills are not gone, and there is no way to know that the problems in the bills will be resolved before congress decides to act on them again. When the bills come back in a month, how do we know that the problems are going to be fixed?
Additionally, these bills originally had broad support in D.C. Our representatives either truly believed that fundamentally changing the structure of the internet and using “The Great Firewall of China” to stop piracy is a good thing, or they had no idea what they were supporting as they did not bother to do their research. So either your representative wants to censor your access to information or your representative is willfully ignorant and not doing their job.
Finally, despite these massive protests the corporate backers of these bills see nothing wrong with it. These corporate backers believe that your access to the internet should be censored. These corporate backers believe that if I post a link to a site that contains even a single piece of copyrighted material that they should be able to shut this site down as I did not do enough to ensure I was not providing you information on how to get copyrighted material. Even if these companies lose this fight this year, they will be back next year and every following year until they get what they want, or go out of business.
So despite this initial victory the war is not over. Continue to contact your representatives about these issues. Consider who the corporate backers of these bills are and limit the money you give them. Some of the backers are so big you likely have no idea if you are giving them your money or not when you buy something, and that is understandable, but when you do know buy an alternative if possible.