For the third day of Anime, we remember the strike that saved the Internet.
Back in November of 2011, I mentioned a bill called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) that would not only have a profound effect on the internet, but also blogosphere as well since most of what we write is derivative work. If you don’t know what is SOPA (and PIPA), it’s a piece of legislation that if signed into law, would have given the US government full control to shut down any website that have links to one or more piece of copyright infringing content. Not only that, even if a copyrighted material is used under fair use, a site can still be taken down for uncertainty. So basically, the Aniblogosphere could get swept away instantly if someone files a copyright complaint.
Thankfully, SOPA and its counterpart didn’t get passed in Congress as the Internet strongly protested against this draconian bill. Not only the big guys like Wikipedia and Reddit blacked out their sites, but also several blogs in the blogosphere. In addition, ACTA also got shot down in a similar fashion thanks to protests against that treaty, which caused the European Union to ultimately reject it. While there are a few proposals left that threaten the open Internet, thankfully SOPA and PIPA got shelved for good so that the Anime Blogosphere will keep on striving and we can continue to share our passion for the medium. Because of this, this achievement strongly obviously deserves some recognition.
Also, here is a video explaining the implications of SOPA if passed:
Tomorrow: Wishing Rocks… ¶
The battle between us Internet users and SOPA/PIPA had been quite the fight. Even though we won, they still had been a few sacrifices (megaupload, fileserve, hotfile and a lot of other “old” file hosts) but I’m still glad SOPA didn’t pass, it will literally be the end of the world for all of us if that happens.
Ahhh, I remembered that Megaupload got taken down because of that. In general, filehosts are risky business compared to sharing stuff on IRC, which cannot be detected easily. But hopefully from this, the internet is more aware with the government’s attempts trying to censor the internet.