Down with PIPA!

Fellow interneters,

It has come to my understanding that a bill is rushing through American Congress right now that threatens our way of life. The American government wants to censor the internet.

We cannot let this happen.

For why?

Because of the freedom of information act. Because of the right to freedom of speech. Because of our need to accumulate knowledge with ease.

The idea is that with this bill the government will be able to shut down sites that distribute illegal content. But how far will they go?

As we, the internet, know every government that has ever existed has tried to keep things from us. Occasionally they do outrageous things outside their jurisdiction like, for example, shutting down Wikileaks. In fact, not so long ago the British government used taxpayers money to buy up every single copy of a book that revealed sensitive information just so that it didn't get into public eyes. Technically there was nothing wrong with the book, and that's why the publishers went for it, but because the government didn't want us to see it they bought up every single copy that existed.

And now they're trying to do it to the internet.

Okay, yes, it's fair enough that they want to try and stop illegal material from being distributed around the world and preventing industries like the film industry losing money. But at the end of the day, who gives a shit?

Better yet, why would they stop there? The bill is ambiguous enough for this censorship to spread through to sites like YouTube and Facebook, which means that those companies would lose millions of pounds because they'd have to censor their users to stop the sites from being closed. At the moment, social networking sites operate under the pretence that the users are responsible for the content that they put up, but with this new bill it would be the site owners' problem, which could mean that the biggest money makers in the world right now (Google, Facebook, YouTube etc) would lose millions, and that would impact on the economy a hell of a lot more than a couple of films not making much money.

The internet is the biggest and fastest growing industry in the entire world. And that is because not even the sky is the limit, because for once it is down to the audience, people like you and me, to generate the content. A lot of it is mindless drivel, yes, but it is there.

I pull you back to a point I made in the essay I did for A-Level Media. The entire mid-east uprising against dictatorship (Libya, Egypt etc) started on Facebook. So what if the governments got the ability to censor that? There will be much more room for corruption, information would be scarce, and the world would turn to shit.

Now, of course there are many problems with a machine like the internet. It may look like it is constantly spinning out of control. But you know what it actually is? It's us. In our raw form. Saying what we want because no one can stop us. The way things should be. In fact, I concur. If I couldn't get my word out in this blog then I'd just be a voice in a head, to be heard by no one. What kind of a world would it be if Inside Voices couldn't be heard? It would be horrific.

And so, today, dozens of websites blacked themselves out to represent a world with censorship. To raise show what will happen if we let this bill pass. Wikipedia, the world's biggest encyclopaedia, pissed off loads of people because they couldn't copy and paste things into their essays. But that's exactly what our lives will be like if we let this bill pass.

"But Wikipedia doesn't violate any - "

Let me stop you there. Wikipedia is a vast resource of lots of things copied and pasted onto one massive site. It is literally like every single GCSE student in the world got together to plagiarise the shit out of everything they could. So yes, Wikipedia would be affected very much so because it technically violates some crap about protecting creative licensing, or whatever. That bit might be wrong, but you catch my drift. Either way, no one cares, not even the creators of the original content (in fact, they probably had a hand in putting it in Wikipedia) because we love the idea of having this sanctum of knowledge at our fingertips.

So if you don't want to know about the world outside your living room, then you can go ahead and let this bill pass, but if you want continued freedom of information, then we, the most powerful voice on the planet, must put a stop to it.

Now turn to your right and give the person next to you a fist bump. If there isn't someone to your right, then hopefully you're to the right of someone else. If you are alone, GET UP AND FIST BUMP SOMEONE.

P.S. On a similar note, if we were censored, then I couldn't say radical things like this: If Twitter tweets, then Facebook faeces.

Pete out.