Giantseed Creative DOES NOT Support SOPA

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Giantseed Creative LLC is firmly against the new Stop Online Piracy Act, not for what it's trying to do, but the potential ramifications it could have on the Internet as we know it today.

SOPA is a new bill brought by the entertainment industry that could cripple the Internet as we know it. It is such a volatile topic that companies like GoDaddy lost thousands of domains by supporting the bill before backtracking, and the hacktivist group Anonymouse threatened to take down Sony again, before they said they were against it.

The bill states that it could potentially block any site with copyright infringing material on it. "But I have a website for my own business you say. How would that affect me?" Suppose someone quoted a movie, song, or work of fiction on your site comments. You could be potentially targeted for blockage.

The bill is worded so vaguely that any site could be in violation. And it could censor the Internet like China and other communist countries.

This bill was created to stop online piracy, which seems like a good measure, but it doesn't block IP addresses so it does absolutely nothing to stop what it claims to do because people will just start using the IP addresses of their favorite sites.

As a web developer this bill has me concerned. Though our contract stipulates that we cannot be held accountable from our clients when their site infringes on copyrighted material that doesn't stop the federal government or the entertainment industry from doing so. If we create a site for a startup or a legitimate business and a comment or a picture is included that is copyrighted, we could be sued out of existence.

For more information watch the video below or click the SOPA wikipedia link. Or read the bill for yourself.

Posted By Chris Robinson
Tagged with Business Censorship SOPA