I was trawling through Facebook this morning and I saw this image on a friend’s Facebook page. If you read the whole thing it basically says that we should boycott purchasing any media as a protest to the media industry’s support of SOPA and PIPA. This leads me to a few questions about the SOPA/PIPA protests. First, if you don’t know what SOPA and PIPA are please read my previous post. On January 18th many well-known sites blacked out their pages in protest to SOPA and PIPA, this included Wikipedia and our own WordPress. These sites wanted to show the world what the internet would be like without the ability to load user content freely. These protests I understand. These protests were able to garner large amounts of national attention and get the politicians talking. This form of protesting served its purpose. Now how will Black March help? The reason for these bills is because the music and movie industry believe that overseas file sharing companies like piratebay.com are stealing their profits. All this protest would do is give more ammunition to these industries. What we need to do as people who want free internet, that allows one to exchange new ideas is to propose alternatives. If these bills were about file sharing only, people wouldn’t be freaking out so badly, but these bills are about policing all content on the internet, and we need to show other solutions to this problem. Solutions like Black March would only hurt the little guy, the author who is struggling to make it, the artist who is on the Indie Circuit, the filmmaker with a creative idea, and those are the people we want to support.
