Despite a well-publicized, widespread "blackout" by some of the Internet's biggest superpowers, the current scourge of the online masses isn't going away yet.
As sites like Google, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Wikipedia and a slew of others continue to black out their sites today in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the bill's chief supporter refuses to back down. Representative Lamar Smith announced today that the endless stream of criticism and dwindling supporters won't keep him from moving forward with SOPA next month.
For those that aren't familiar with SOPA, here's a piece from the Wall Street Journal about what the proposed bill is all about.
The short definition is that SOPA expands the government's authority to shut down U.S.-based websites that have pirated content. That in itself is a noble goal, but what has the Internet up in arms is the broad language of the bill, which would allow innocent websites who unknowingly had pirated content to be prosecuted.
Obviously there is a lot of other issues that play into this controversy, but the overall protest is centered on the dramatic increase in censorship SOPA would lead to. Whether it's federally-mandated or simply sites being overly cautious, SOPA would drastically alter the state of the Internet...and not necessarily for the better.
