SOPA would be the end of blogs like this

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, is expected to be voted on this week. And you can help prevent it from passing.

But why do you care? Because it’s not about fighting piracy. It’s about being able to police everything on the internet. It’s about the government being able to limit our access until all that remains on the web resembles China’s heavily-censored net. All anyone would have to do is cry copyright infringement and a website could be taken down. Sites that rely heavily on linking, like blogs like this (Weekly Reader anyone?) would be shut down or stripped of content. Use a song in the background of that YouTube video of your cat? Copyright infringement, gone. Want to look up something on Wikipedia? Well if someone’s not authorized to write about a particular topic, then the article could be taken down. This is all without mentioning that you could and, in all likelihood, would be held accountable and possibly charged or serve jail time for your unknown infringement. The lawsuits would be practically never-ending.

How you can help stop this: You can help by signing this petition, or by making a call to congress to tell them that playing Big Brother is not okay.

The internet today is great because we can share ideas openly across the entire world. It’s how a lot of women discover feminism, learn what the abstinence-only sex ed left out of the curriculum, and find like-minded people to band together and make change in the world. We only have so much time left to stand up and tell Congress that it is not okay to try to block out what we can and can’t see on the web, to try to control what knowledge we can gain.