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Hearing a lot of buzz about SOPA (and it’s sister bill PIPA) but aren’t quite sure what the fuss is about? Get a crash course thanks to this informative video by Fight for the Future. Here’s some quick background:

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites so long as they can convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill would cost us $47 million tax dollars a year — that’s for a fix that won’t work, disrupts the internet, stifles innovation, shuts out diverse voices, and censors the internet.

And here’s the video:

Many online presences —including BoingBoing, Reddit and Wikipedia—are going black on Wednesday, January 18th in protest of these bills. 

Via Fight for the Future.

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