Many problems arise when your country’s legislature is consistently more responsive to its donors than its constituents. One of these problems is that simple good ideas can’t just be left alone to bask in their goodness.
The Internet is clearly a good idea—not tautologically good, but certainly one of the better things that’s happened to human communication and the spread of knowledge in recent centuries. But now some people in Congress who didn’t know what an MP3 was until their granddaughter got an iPod a few years ago, want to go and ruin the web to benefit a few reactionary trade groups who would prefer censorship to innovation. A bill that was introduced into the House last month, called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), aims to penalize or eliminate websites that have pirated content, and the repercussions for Internet users could be far-reaching. - MediaShift Idea Lab - DontBreakTheInternet: How The Web Became a Political Force vs. SOPA | PBS
The Internet is clearly a good idea—not tautologically good, but certainly one of the better things that’s happened to human communication and the spread of knowledge in recent centuries. But now some people in Congress who didn’t know what an MP3 was until their granddaughter got an iPod a few years ago, want to go and ruin the web to benefit a few reactionary trade groups who would prefer censorship to innovation. A bill that was introduced into the House last month, called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), aims to penalize or eliminate websites that have pirated content, and the repercussions for Internet users could be far-reaching. - MediaShift Idea Lab - DontBreakTheInternet: How The Web Became a Political Force vs. SOPA | PBS
