Go to Wikipedia now, and you WON’T find the English Site, well you can view the english page on the SOPA Bill, but if you try and view anything else you’ll be greeted with a message about anti piracy bills, along with a recommendation to phone a senator. Wikipedia is one of the highest-traffic sites on the Internet (top ten in ranking depending on how you look) and they’re protesting these bills. -Kids you should’ve done your homework this afternoon because now that research paper that’s due tomorrow will be much more difficult.
SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act and the TECH-industry is buzzing about SOPA and PIPA, another anti-piracy bill (To learn more about these bills check out Unofficial’s earlier article).These two controversial bills, have sparked discourse, actually more like war, between Hollywood big shots and Silicon Valley nerds. To paraphrase -media companies are pro SOPA, while the nerds are throwing their World of Warcraft powers into opposing the bills.
So why doesn’t Hollywod like the internet? Basically many corporations such as the Motion Picture Association of America believe that online piracy leads to billions of dollars revenue lost for the U.S. Economy as well they argue that countless U.S. job have been lost, (because of the internet right, not the financial crises, we just want to make sure we understand…) anyway Hollywood and the film industry cry it deprives content creators such as Steven Spielberg and Michale Bay of income (and they don’t make enough $). Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia says that Hollywood’s billion dollar number is just wishful thinking:
“Wishful Thinking meaning if you count every single download and pretend the person would have paid full retail for something instead of just not consuming it, then you get some pretty large numbers. But, from the point of view of an economist, that isn’t necessarily the right way to measure.” -CNN
Hey Hollywood, do you really think that the Internet (the greatest gift of our generation) is the right thing to be worrying about? Aren’t there bigger problems in the world. In a nut shell Wikipedia want’s to send a message to the government that:
“the Internet is going to get really mad if you try to censor the Internet.” -IBID
More Information from CNN