Just so you guys know- there’s an LJ post that’s being spread around about this. And it’s not just… a little spread. It’s like… an entire single page of my friends list was seeing it and only it. Now… there’s something wrong with it. It’s old. Not like, super old. It was from last week. They had the congressional hearing on SOPA to vote on it yesterday.

They did not finish the vote, and the act is going to be amended to try to make it work. There’s already been a decision for it.

Now- I might say something that would rile people up, but… You know what? If they make it so that it doesn’t take down innocent people on multiple websites? Good. Because a lot of stuff that this act is meant to target is things like online pharmacies that are illegal. Or the spam that you’re getting for specific other things… or people who do stupid crap like leak a movie or game onto the internet weeks before its release.

Then there’s a loophole that it’s written for American IP’s (intellectual properly) on American IP (internet protocol) addresses and sites. It’s not built for international situations, which is also a problem.

But as a photographer, I’ve seen things such as people’s photography being used by major news outlets from stock photography sites. Without paying for them. What the hell, guys? This is meant to protect stuff like that, as well.

The only problem is, the text of the act proves that they do not have someone technically inclined working on it. This is a huge problem in our government nowadays anyway. There needs to be someone who can understand what these geezers don’t.

You know a quote from Wired?

“I’m not a technical expert on this,” the chairman of the committee said, adding moments later: “I’m trying to ferret this out.” When he introduced the package last month, however, he pronounced that the bill was needed because “Rogue websites that steal and sell American innovations have operated with impunity.”

I bolded the important part.

I’M NOT A TECHNICAL EXPERT

Yesterday, when debating the act, they never thought to call in an IT specialist. They wanted more lawyers. In the case of this bill, they need someone with expertise to know exactly how Google functions, to know how DNS servers function. They think that it might be easy to tell Google to stop indexing websites, when the whole search engine is primarily automated at this point. I don’t know how Google is setup on the backend, specifically, but I don’t think making it stop indexing sites here and there is going to be as easy as ‘flipping a switch’ or changing a setting on that particular site.

Nevertheless, now that this is out of my system… Please take note of things, when an article says something like ‘five days from now’ instead of giving an exact date, and people wait until the day of the event to start sharing it? It begins spreading misinformation (something that demandprogress is VERY good at, by the way). It’s important to read and research a post instead of just reading one post and spreading it all over the place. The EFF is a great site- better than the aforementioned website, in fact… and the information is good. It’s just outdated now.

I’ll hop off of my soapbox now and get to work. :>