STOP THE SOPA ACT

            The Internet is basically my life. There’s websites to help me understand things like Google or Wikipedia, and I honestly couldn’t do my homework without them… and then there’s websites for social networking, that I end up spending way too much time on everyday (Tumblr and Facebook…). And, there’s always YouTube, where I spend hours watching music videos and stupid animal videos for entertainment. Sadly, if I didn’t spend my time going to these websites, I would have nothing to do. So, if those websites or things like that were shut down, I don’t know what I would do with my life. This is why I strongly protest the SOPA act.

            In a way, I understand where they are coming from with trying to pass this act. Everyday, thousands of media files are downloaded or created illegally. And, sometimes people “steal” copyrighted material even if they don’t know it. I really don’t see what the big problem is, though. Maybe because I don’t really have anything out there that’s copyrighted or has a possibility of being stolen. But I think that if someone cared so strongly about their music or video, maybe the rights should change for just that one person’s material, not necessarily everyone else.

            But then, there’s the side I’m on, the people against the act. I’m not only against it because of the possibility of them shutting down my favorite websites. I think it is against our rights as citizens of the US. As citizens, we get the right to many things like freedom, and that’s what’s supposed to make our country better than some other countries. With this new act, though, they are going against our freedom of speech. If they do end up going through with the bill, they would shut down any website or blog that has the possibility of copyright. I feel like the government would find reasons to shut down many innocent blogs and websites, only because they took a quote or picture from somewhere and didn’t cite it. Actually, they would be going against this bill even if their sources were cited. This just seems unfair, and almost makes no one able to post anything… at all. Also, the whole point of a lot of sites like social networking websites is to share things.  If they are trying to shut down the Internet forever, I guess it’s working. Because, honestly, I don’t think there would be any reason to use the Internet when I can’t even go onto the websites I use.