What to do if SOPA Passes?

The online piracy act is one of a few sets of legislation being worked out in the USA at the moment. If you’ve come across sites blacked out with SOPA written on them, they are protesting against it.

Fundamentally the proposals are seeking to inhibit distribution of copyrighted material, using a really vague set of criteria which will have the flow on effect of blacklisting many sites which are totally legit.

Satire, critical review, freedom of speech, poorly conceived internet memes,  and happy snaps with brands in the background will all be open for turn down. Worse – the companies which host the material (Facebook, youTube, WordPress, etc…) will face legal challenges. You as the user will suffer.

Its a cluster-fuck of an idea. Sorry for the language, but – that is how impressively stupid this concept is.

I think the idea of censoring the internet is a joke as it will irritate everyone, have major impacts on businesses and individuals, and not protect against piracy. Oh, what, wait – you think it will help? Really?

Then shut up and read.

How to ignore the legislation once passed:

Step One – find a country with far more free ideas for information distribution. There are heaps. China rings a bell, but they’ve got their own Internet firewall issues, and we all know that China is Un-American. Instead try any country in Europe, perhaps Sweden, or some such. Anywhere that thinks Wikileaks is OK will probably be fine.

Don’t even bother trying Australia, our media ownership rules are so borked that we’re likely to just turn the internet off instead of apply some common sense. And we’re 10,000 miles away from anything fun too.

Actually try somewhere that also offers private bank accounts – they’re bound to be dodgy enough to stick it to the USA’s new laws.

Step Two – purchase a dedicated VPN service to a provider in that country. Its anywhere from $10 to $5 per month. And when the entire population of the USA can’t watch YouTube the prices will drop due to massive competition. In 6 months you’ll pay $25 to US$30 for a Year subscription.

How do I know the price will drop? Look at the pricing of Internet bandwidth in the USA. Actually don’t, keep concentrating on this.

Step Three – reconnect to the new Internet, and all your traffic cannot be traced back to you via your ISP, and the countries which thought you were American or whatever, now only know that you come from some tin-pot country where the Internet is still free.

Thats it. Re-open what ever you were doing, and keep sharing. I’m sure a new http://www.Facebook.ru will be started shortly, and we’ll all be posting junk there in no time.

Net effect = lots of irritation. Loss of revenue. Loss of jobs. Less freedom. More lawsuits. Same allowance for piracy. Same downloads from dodgy places.

Brilliant.

Now go type “SOPA” into Google and learn how to make your voice heard. Soon you may not be able to.