Update: It looks like SOPA has been shelved for now but I still think it’s important to blackout our sites for the day to show how we feel about this issue.

On January 24th, the US Senate is voting on SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. While the bill may sound like a good thing – who likes piracy? But, this bill is really an Internet Censorship Bill that will negatively impact any of us who have websites. According to Boing Boing, if I wanted to link to a site I would have to make sure that there was no copyright infringement ANYWHERE on that site – not just the page I wanted to link to. I would potentially have to check thousands if not millions of pages to verify that I could link to that site. And, if I didn’t take this precaution my ad revenue could be shut down, my domain confiscated and my IP address added to a blacklist.
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