Leaving our current discussion aside for a while I want to point your attention to the following two bills that have been causing a lot of stir. SOPA and PIPA. I could make a lot of arguments myself, rave and rant, but I’m not going to do that.

I will rather bring the best argument I’ve heard against both by The Man himself, John “TotalBiscuit” Bain. TB is a UK law graduate, professional gaming commentator and journalist. He has been in the scene for years. His argument is the best researched and most compelling out there (despite having one particular error, TB confused Activision with EA, but he corrected that error in the notes.)

Before I give you TB himself, let me add that a massive amount of people has been protesting against this since December. Today even companies like Activision and Riot are up in arms. Professional e-sports teams like Team Liquid, Team Dignitas and Evil Genuises (basically the cream of e-sports) is coming out in protest. Mike “Husky” Lamond (one of the Starcraft pioneers) is trying to get a meeting with senators to tell them the concerns people have.

Of course there have been arguments for it, too. None of them make much sense and SOPA will not stop piracy. That is a simple fact. There are already ways to circumvent the measures floating around since, well, the actual userers of the internet know the internet better than the babbling, bumbling band of baboons on the Hill, who can barely operate a keyboard and usually don’t know the difference between a mouse and a trackball. Also interesting is that the candidates for POTUS are all very silent about it.

Now if you think this is a US only problem… Wrong. A court in the Netherlands has now ordered ISPs to remove access to pirating sites. In Germany some politicians are talking about outright restricting access to the net in order to “fight crime” and “protect the children”. Protect from what? The evil things on the net? That’s where parents come in. It’s their duty to do that.

In my opinion what makes SOPA and similar ideas in the EU so interesting for politicians is that they can’t control the internet. The internet is a source of information the lying thieves in our parliaments have absolutely no control over. People can go there to find stuff that doesn’t fit into the way our so called leaders want us to think. Thus they jump at this with glee and SOPA/PIPA are effectively bipartisan efforts by both the Democrats and the Republicans, once again proving that what I’ve said about the political aristocracy being our worst enemy is 100% correct.

I would like to note that even the lunatics from OWS are against this and it’s somewhat scary that I agree with them on something.

SOPA and PIPA have to be stopped.

Links:

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ngd4r/i_work_in_news_this_is_how_…
http://tinyurl.com/techdirtsopa
http://reddit.com/r/sopa
http://www.americancensorship.org
http://tinyurl.com/universalcensors
http://tinyurl.com/writetocongress
http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_internet
http://t.co/vIhyPU9z
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/sopa-vote-delayed/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/free-speechs-weak-links-under-internet-…

Now I will stop rambling about it and give you John “TotalBiscuit” Bain: