STOP SOPA! I Guess?

This morning I awoke to a nagging, sickly feeling. As this site has seen its proverbial stock rise, has it strayed from its roots? Where was the sense of whimsy, the irreverence that set this site apart from any other online repository of news. In those heady early days you never knew what you'd find on The Redel Traub Report. Sure we talked about politics and news, but we did it with childlike wonder and a tongue in cheek tone that made this site particularly groundbreaking.

I was particularly proud of the Adventures on Wikipedia series, the article about Pepsi was the first I wrote for this website and I received overwhelmingly positive feedback about that article as well as the article about George Washington Carver. In an effort to try and recreate the unbridled passion, the avant garde nature of those early days, I took to Wikipedia today. I thought an interesting article could be crafted about any number of things, Magic 8-balls or Ramen Noodles were early favorites. I took to Wikipedia only to find that the site was blacked out today to protest SOPA, the Stop Online Privacy Act.

At this point I must admit that my operating knowledge of technology is paltry. I fundamentally don't understand how electricity works, let alone the internet. Though I operate this blog, it is a bare bones operation and works entirely off a template from Google's blogger service. I'd heard about SOPA, but I have little understanding of how it would tangibly affect me or the internet as a whole.

Without Wikipedia to turn to, how could I possibly understand SOPA with my limited vocabulary of technical jargon. I searched SOPA, clicked on the SOPA Wikipedia, and ironically it is the one page they didn't black out today. That seemed to be a wise decision, because with all the news generated from today's blackout many computer illiterates would be curious to learn more about SOPA.

As far as I can tell, SOPA would seek to give the government the ability to shutdown websites that hosted copyrighted materials. This has the effect of making users wary of uploading content on user generated websites, and further more would punish entire domains for one piece of illegal content. Certainly, Internet piracy is a big problem, it has fundamentally altered both the music and movie industry. However, there is little evidence that enforcing copyrights more harshly would lessen internet piracy. According to more technologically informed people, there are relatively simple ways to circumvent SOPA. The real threats seems to be in the vagueness of the bill, which could imperil legitimate sites, and the empowerment of government forces to effectively censor the internet.

To be honest, the practical implications of SOPA are still obtuse to me. However, my understanding is not essential to my use of the internet. As I said earlier, if I was forced to understand the electronics I used, I'd be a Luddite. There's been a whole host of people, far more informed than me, that have spoken out against SOPA. Combined with my general aversion towards any limiting of freedom of speech, I can proudly say I don't support SOPA. In fact I wish I'd blacked out my site today in protestation of SOPA. Even if I don't really understand what SOPA is.