3, going on that one article. It's worth pointing out that the cnet article makes several assertions of fact that isn't backed up by any given data within the same article.

I like to keep factual reporting completely separated from opinion writing, even though I know that such a thing is impossible these days. (You'd have to read up on the history of journalism to understand)

.....yeah..... I would.....

The Colbert Report has a portion of the bill (being discussed) the anti piracy act (name as dumb as the clean air bill that did the opposite).

Colbert had two guys on,  one was the "defender of theives and pirates" ( a smart man a professor at like harvard) and the other replied - some businessman/blogger who said "oh, you are exaggerating, they woulnd't go after justin beiber, (regular people) they are just going to go after international companies or china" (so naive/dumb...)

(sorry too lazy to look for the clip) it was last week, nov 30th or dec 1st I think...

We NEED the internet for things like business, etc.

Morons trying to pass it- Some fun facts that you either don't know, don't listen to or just can't be assed about.

Look at the money made by Mark Zuckerberg, look at the money google makes. Thousands of business start off and use the internet to grow. Do you want to increase unemployment?

I learnt more from the internet than I did from my first high school. Everyone who uses the internet learns something from it.

People express themselves online. People build and make relationships. People find help for problems. People find methods of escape from problems. By the year 2020 half the population will have depression. The internet maybe can decrease those numbers. Do you want that to happen? Do you want suicide ratings to increase?

Online shopping helps the economy more than hollywood movies. The internet as a whole helps the economy nearly 70x more than hollywood movies.

Many more fun facts but i'd be here all day stating them.

If you cba (can't be arsed) for cites you cba.
I'm like that every time I look for "The Real Rain Man"'s actual name (Kim Peek) after I've somehow forgotten it. There are numerous other forms of subject matter that I feel like bringing up in conversations when I don't remember the book names, tv quotations, web addresses, and (most importantly!) the names and dates of the subject matter in question.

Bottomline, if I can't be bothered to focus on 'it' at the time I'm reading about 'it' (meaning zero aureal and visual distractions), I can't be bothered to remember it accurately.

Essentially this bill is really the MPAA, RIAA, etc. shooting themselves in the foot. If they make their content that difficult to obtain and they push very hard with making their music only known to those with the money to pay for it, then more people will gravitate towards Free Culture Movements. Essentially, a nice good old fashioned boycott should shut up the big corporations for good. Though its doubtful this could ever happen the more people keep shutting up and taking the crap that the RIAA, MPAA, etc. keeps handing us.

Its great to fight against Censorship. However, if the RIAA wants to make it hard for everyone to listen to their music, if the MPAA wants to make it hard for us to watch their movies, etc. then let them go the way of the dinosaur. The more they act like complete fools, the more they will die essentially making the free market stronger.

Support people like Richard Stallman, Jello Biafra, as well as other artists, movie makers and software developers who are independents. These people will help to make a strong base for a free culture movement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_culture_movement

This post was last modified: 12-13-2011 06:25 PM by j0hnny.

If you refuse to support SOPA — like Google, Al Gore, Paul Ryan and many Internet companies — a new Android app called wants to help you take the next step and become a SOPA boycotter.

The free App, Boycott SOPA, scans products’ labels to determine whether they are made by or associated with a SOPA-supporting brand. A product returns a “bad item” alert if it is made by one of 873 SOPA-supporting brands. College juniors Chris Thompson and Chris Doranti, students at the University of British Columbia, compiled the list from media reports and Reddit links.

SOPA, if passed, would give the U.S. federal government power to disable a website it found to be in violation of copyright law.

The app’s “bad companies” list includes subsidiaries and parent companies of supporting brands. Coca-Cola, for instance, made the list through SOPA-supporter L’Oreal, which is owned in part by Coke’s Nestea partner, Nestle.

It does not include products such as movies and music, however. The heavy hitters of the entertainment industry are SOPA’s most vocal supporters.

Doranti tells Mashable he’s aware the list isn’t exhaustive. “That’s why we include a disclaimer,” he says.

The app has worked well enough to hit a chord with Android users, however. Doranti says that since launching Boycott SOPA on Friday evening, more than 5,000 users have scanned more than 15,000 items.

Eventually, the app’s creators hope to make a version that would also identify offending items in other boycotts. They started with SOPA, says Doranti, since “we thought it would be a cool programming project … we’re connoisseurs of the Internet, and SOPA is going to screw the Internet up.”

http://mashable.com/2012/01/09/boycott-sopa/

Study Confirms: News Networks Owned By SOPA Supporters... Are Ignoring SOPA/PIPA
from the but,-of-course dept
While the debates about SOPA/PIPA have been raging all over the internet, and appearing regularly in all sorts of mainstream newspapers, they still have been almost entirely absent from TV news. We've discussed this in the past, noting that the major TV news players are all owned by media conglomerates who have been major backers of SOPA/PIPA. There was some indication that cable news was starting to pay attention... but things have gone quiet since then (perhaps upper management sent out a memo...).

The folks over at Media Matters decided to check in on this and have confirmed that the big TV news players have almost entirely ignored it, despite the widespread controversy found elsewhere in the mainstream press:

As the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) makes its way through Congress, most major television news outlets -- MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, and NBC -- have ignored the bill during their evening broadcasts. One network, CNN, devoted a single evening segment to it.
The report does note that there have been articles online... but very few TV segments. It also discusses how much attention SOPA/PIPA is getting, concerning all the companies who have come out against it, the media coverage in the NY Times among other places, and the big GoDaddy flip-flop -- to highlight that this is a big story making waves.
Despite all of this, the response from American television news outlets has been to almost completely ignore the story during their evening programming. The lone exception was a segment on CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer in December, during which CNN parent company Time Warner's support for the legislation was not disclosed. (Though Fox News Channel has apparently not touched the story during evening programming, conservative/libertarian host Andrew Napolitano has run several segments vocally opposing SOPA on his program, which runs on the separate Fox Business Network.)
It's postulated that perhaps the issue is the fact that SOPA/PIPA don't fall along easily scripted left vs. right lines:
The fight over SOPA does not fit into the usual left vs. right narrative that occupies so much of the political horserace coverage with which TV news outlets fill their schedules. The cosponsors of SOPA come from both sides of the aisle. Likewise, the most vocal opponents of SOPA in Congress are an ideologically diverse bunch, including Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Ron Paul (R-TX) and Darrel Issa (R-CA).
Either that... or the corporate folks upstairs don't want to allow this to become an even bigger story.

Of course, as I was writing this up, Tim Cushing was writing up the same story (coordination, people, coordination!), with an alternate theory -- which makes sense too. So, everything below the line is his read on the situation:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Cushing's analysis: Gray areas seldom make compelling news, especially when there's no political angle to take. Beyond that, I think the mainstream media silence is also explained by the outdated thought process that still believes that the Internet Is Not Real.

First and foremost, the evening news is generally a broad overview of the days' happenings. Not only do they not have the time to delve into an issue that mainly affects an "ethereal" service like the web, but they also (ignoring any corporate bias for the sake of argument) have no interest in doing so. The cliche that "if it bleeds, it leads" likely eliminates a war that involves a bloodless dismantling of the internet. The internet is generally trotted out only as an example of how things are bad (online bullying, etc.) or how things are cute/weird (any crossover meme that can be easily brought up, discussed and dismissed forever in less than 60 seconds).

Even though many news teams invite you to follow them on Twitter or Facebook, the connection seems to go no further than that. The percentage of the population that still relies on the evening news to get them caught up on the world is unlikely to care about legislation that affects the internet.

In essence, the internet is still treated like some sort of fad infested with tech-y nerds and thus can be safely ignored when dealing with Real Issues on the nightly news. This attitude is pervasive, both within content companies and among our representatives. The gatekeepers pushing the legislation need the internet as much as it claims it needs them, but they want their own internet, one closer in spirit to The Village than the Wild West.

Our legislators are still amused by their own lack of internet prowess, indicating that they still believe the web to be some sort of "outlier" whose opinions can be easily dismissed. It's a cognitive gap, but it explains why the mainstream TV news so willingly ignores SOPA and the building momentum of its opposition: it's just the internet. It can be either humored or feared, but never respected.


http://www.techdirt.com/articles/2012010...pipa.shtml

SOPA: What if Google, Facebook and Twitter Went Offline in Protest


Can you imagine a world without Google or Facebook? If plans to protest the potential passing of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) come to fruition, you won’t need to; those sites, along with many other well-known online destinations, will go temporarily offline as a taste of what we could expect from a post-SOPA Internet.

Companies including Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Yahoo! and Wikipedia are said to be discussing a coordinated blackout of services to demonstrate the potential effect SOPA would have on the Internet, something already being called a “nuclear option” of protesting. The rumors surrounding the potential blackout were only strengthened by Markham Erickson, executive director of trade association NetCoalition, who told FoxNews that “a number of companies have had discussions about [blacking out services]” last week.

According to Erickson, the companies are well aware of how serious an act such a blackout would be:

This type of thing doesn’t happen because companies typically don’t want to put their users in that position. The difference is that these bills so fundamentally change the way the Internet works. People need to understand the effect this special-interest legislation will have on those who use the Internet.
The idea of an Internet blackout should seem familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention to the debate so far. In addition to a blackout already carried out by Mozilla, hacking group Anonymous proposed the same thing a couple of weeks ago, suggesting that sites replace their front pages with a statement protesting SOPA. That suggestion itself came a week after Jimmy Wales had asked Wikipedia users about the possibility of blacking out that site in protest of the bill


As a way of drawing attention to the topic, it’s something that will definitely work. Just Google alone going dark would cause havoc online, but the idea of it happening at the same time as Facebook, Twitter et al. follow suit seems almost unimaginable.

The question then becomes how to translate the inevitable confusion and outrage from those who don’t know what SOPA is into activism. The key, I assume, lies in the execution of the blackout: Will the sites that voluntarily go down be entirely unavailable or will they follow the Anonymous-proposed model of replacing the front page with a statement explaining what is going on, why and how users can best become involved in the discussion? If the sites do go entirely dark, is the hope that the resulting outrage will be enough to fuel news stories about the reason behind the decision? And that users will not transfer their frustration to the sites themselves, as opposed to the bill they’re protesting?

The fact that Facebook and Twitter are both said to be considering taking part in the blackout is simultaneously heartening and worrying. The former because, well, they’re standing up for what they collectively believe in — and that’s a good thing. But the latter because the lack of availability for social media on the proposed blackout day feels like it’s giving up the best chance to harness the frustration and energy people will feel about the temporary loss of the Internet as they know it, and a great possibility to focus and direct that energy into productive activism against SOPA. Then again, it may take losing Facebook and Twitter to really drive home how dramatically SOPA could affect the Internet.

All of this may come to nothing, of course. The companies may decide not to black out their sites and find other ways to protest SOPA. That could be for the best; collectively closing down the most trafficked sites on the Internet to prove a point will certainly garner a lot of attention, but the effects it’ll have beyond that (and the reactions it’ll cause as a result) are difficult to predict and could easily end up causing a backlash against the sites responsible at a time when they least want it. But still … just try to imagine an Internet without Google, Facebook or Yahoo. Even for a day. Almost makes you want it to happen, just to make people realize how reliant we are on the Internet as we know it now, doesn’t it?

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2012/01/05/sopa...z1j0frItsQ

So our Government wants to censor our internet?
Wouldn't that violate the first amendment? The amendment about freedom of speech? oh wait a moment here, our freedom is already being taken away from us as we speak. Remember 9/11? Yeah that was planned by the Government to force Homeland security on us by scaring the living f*** out of us...  

And it's only a matter of time before Congress passes a new law to silent those protesters of Occupy Wall Street. I can already hear the foreign countries laughing their a**es off at us for our stupidity. Therefore I'm moving to Canada and becoming a Canadian Citizen.

Personally I think it's a matter of time before the Country of China comes and takes over this country because didn't we borrow a sh** load of money from them in one of our bailout plans? And anyways I think it's going to get a lot worse for this country before this year ends.

Conspiracy Theorist much?

actually they are right on target

Hey Buddy, I'm the real life Dale Gribble, And yes I have a ton of them... Lol

(Watch one episode of King of the Hill, if you don't get it)

and aren't you tired of those foreign Countries laughing at you? At our stupidity? I apologize if I had offended anyone here, but that's how I feel

And why do you feel like that? Don't get me wrong, sometimes I agree with how stupid somethings get... then again... I only been back and adapted into American culture for 18 years of my life....