SOPA & PIPA

SOPA and PIPA are two bills that were brought up in the Senate to deal with pirating in the digital age. This is a serious issue of the government trying to do the right thing but going about it in entirely the wrong way. The bills are supposed to be a way for pirating to be stopped however, it will do a lot more than that. If the bills pass and a website has a link that connects it to copyrighted material the site will be closed. This includes youtube where girls are singing along to a pop song, wikipedia where someone quotes from a movie, etc. This would in effect be the US government censoring the web. This issue has been all over LIS blogs and other sites.

A lot of others explain it much better than me. Such as this video,

Or the following infographic, from wearelibrarians.com.

Today many websites are blacked out to protest these bills. Instead of going to the site people are redirected to a SOPA strike. There they can view the infographic or this video, PIPA Video. Or they see a pop up window like this one.