While doing my reading for the last and final blog I found out many new things I didn’t know about a lot of laws that trying to be pass. I didn’t know how serious a lot of people are taking these things serious. Reading about these articles made me want to dig deeper. As a society today we never know what is really going on. We are so busy believing what the media is telling us that we forget to do research and find out the facts for ourselves.

In the Technical examination of SOPA and Protect IP it talks about how the internet will be broken into two different Internet sites. It will be the Domestic Internet Site that have a domestic IP address. It has a romaine registered or assigned by a register or other authority located in the United States. The website will have the address of .com, .org, and .us. The other site would be a Foreign internet site. These sites are foreign site that are not within the United States. With this act people will monitor computer to make sure that no one is committing a piracy act. The IP and SOPA people are not going be happy with this act. This is suppose to make it harder for people to pirate movies and other things on the internet.

In the SOPA article it talks about how they want to boycott companies who support the SOPA put some of the companies out of business. The author main goal is to have people write in to these companies and express to them that they will no longer support them or buy anything from them if they support this act. The SOPA act is to “Stop Online Piracy Act”. I truly believe if a lot of people get together this can be something that is succeeded.

In the Year Anonymous Took on Cops, Dictators and Existenital Dread. They are a group of people who go after people who hack into codes and computers. In the year thatMohamed Bouazizi was attack by the police in Sidi that’s when Anonymous came out to let the people know you are being watch by your government. You should stand up for justice and what you believe in. Make sure you are not arrested by fight for your believes with words instead of action. The Anonymous group all dress the same and made sure that they all look alike so they identity was not shown.

SOPA, or the “Stop Online Piracy Act” refers to websites ending in ‘.com’ and ‘.org’, so some examples include facebook.com or tumblr.com, two very prominent leading websites for most anyone to vocalize themselves. Although this deals with what’s called a domestic site, it can deal with foreign sites, too. Protect IP is a little different than SOPA in it’s authoritative powers. For example, SOPA deals with U.S. sites and “copyright infringement,” whereas Protect IP deals with copyright counterfeit; it deals with the activities of the site.. Although these things seem interchangeable, we can think of each of these terms as having very fine lines and very fragile boarders. In the article “I Hope SOPA Passes,” the author makes a very blunt and interesting idea; “it doesn’t address any problems, only the symptom.” Although the author means this in the context referring to people who think that doing slight things will make a huge impact, I think that, in a way, it can also refer to piracy as a whole. Online piracy is a serious issue, and one SOPA/PIPA came along, any felt threatened and concerned that their “voices” on the internet would be taken away. This was something taken for granted, until threaten to be taken away. Once it was threaten, people jumped at the chance to help the cause. The “symptoms” were that people simply did not think about their “voice” on the internet or piracy until it became and issue. Anonymous is another great figure in internet protection. Fighting for their rights to a voice, they use their power to actually do something about SOPA and Protect IP. They deal largely with the political circumstances of the campaign, dealing almost directly with legislators and the public. I think some ramifications of movements such as these and threats such as SOPA are that people may get anxious about what they post on the internet and if it will be censored. We have our voices, and we want to keep them. But how can we do so without stifling creativity and pure enjoyment of the internet?

SOPA is an acronym for House of representatives bill called Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA, House of the Senate bill which stands for Protect Intellectual Property Act. Both are lobbyist bill acts that aim to shut down blogs and web sites from pirating music and movies. Anonymous Act would ban all anonymous internet postings; they are a hacktavist group which claims responsibility for these and other SOPA blackouts. The technology and political circumstances that have intersected giving these issues prominence is over flooding number of websites that offers free music and movies without the permission of the artists who created it. These websites are very prominent because people can watch all the latest movies without spending $9.00 minimum at a movie theatre for a particular movie and likewise is true for music; without having to spend $15.00 on a CD. If the above motioned bills pass, they would give the government broad powers to take down websites, seize domains and compel search engines from indexing these properties. Little more than a request from copyright holders is necessary. It’s essentially guilty-until-proven-innocent legislation that would punish the many for the sins of the few (Wilcox) and further would diminish the free flow of information and likewise diminish internet as we know it today. The White House does not support this legislation and released the following statement: “While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

SOPA is also known as the Stop Online Piracy Act. This bill applies to domestic internet sites. PROTECT IP (PIPA) stands for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011. This bill applies to foreign internet sites, or basically a site that does not use a domestic domain name. These were brought about because there has been an increasing amount of copyright infringement and piracy on the internet and the government is trying to enforce copyright infringement laws to stop the piracy. These two bills give power to the Attorney General to obtain a court order to take action against a foreign infringing site when the sites are involved in copyright infringement or counterfeit products. Orders would be sent out to remove all links to the foreign site from search engines and U.S. sites. In addition, there could be no more transactions occurring between the site and U.S. customers and customers would be blocked from visiting the site. Sites would have to sensor links to entire domains but this will not be able to completely end piracy. This is because it causes increased restrictions against foreign sites but it does not do anything to stop the actual infringement that is occurring. Even if these bills are passed, I believe that piracy will still exist. A group of people who are part of a culture known as Anonymous had quite the reaction to the proposals to strengthen Intellectual Property laws. They organized attacks on government and business sites by hacking into their sites and destroying their servers. This is an example of how the mentioned bills will not completely stop piracy.

Today’s political sphere has been quite attentive to the issues concerning the internet. Recently, Congress has been introducing legislation designed (in their eyes) to make the internet safer to use and more secure. Of course, with almost anything that comes from politics, the policies don’t really do what they are advertised to do.

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) is designed to tighten regulations on usage of copyrighted materials by expanding the power of US law enforcement. What this does, however, isn’t really protect anyone’s rights. What it does do is stifle citizen’s free speech rights. It is highly unlikely any large amount of piracy would be prevented by this act. The people truly affected are those that stream things over the internet, such as games. They are not doing any harm, and recently games have been amending their usage policy to allow the streaming of their games. In their eyes, it is free advertising that does not detract from any revenues they may receive (and in fact probably increases them). This Act did not pass.

PIPA (the Protect IP Act) is a proposed act that also tightens internet regulations around piracy by allowing people who believe their content is being pirated to “censor” the material. By this I mean, they are allowed to block links to copyrighted material. They don’t actually remove the copyrighted material. As the first reading indicates, this truly destroys community based sites such as reddit (as the entire site is simply links to other sites). This also has not passed as of today.

Anonymous is a hacker group that has been dubbed the term “hacktivist” as there actions, while often malicious, are designed to prove a point rather than cause harm. They have been known to defend sites such as megaupload and The Pirate Bay, which are two very commonly used file sharing websites. Neither of which are used primarily to distribute things legally. Both of these sites were shut down at some point or another, which prompted Anonymous retaliation.

Basically, these three terms show the relevance of copyright laws in today’s society. It is one of the most important domestic disputes, but does not seem to receive too much attention in the political sphere. I think this is a mistake. Sure, our economy is not doing the best. But I believe some amount of public discourse should focus on this issue, so that groups don’t have to take it into their own hands to get attention.