What's wrong with SOPA and PIPA.

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) are two bills making their way through Congress. They have the power and potential to destroy the internet as we currently see it.

Read what these bills can do. (Click to expand)

"As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet's underlying infrastructure. The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to block users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the Internet grows increasingly balkanized.

It gets worse: the blacklist bills' provisions would give corporations and other private parties new powers to censor foreign websites with court orders that would cut off payment processors and advertisers. Broad immunity provisions (combined with a threat of litigation) would encourage service providers to overblock innocent users or even block websites voluntarily. This gives content companies every incentive to create unofficial blacklists of websites, which service providers would be under pressure to block without regard to the First Amendment.

Service providers would be forced to monitor and police their users' activities as well, threatening the DMCA safe harbors that have been vital to online innovation over the last decade. SOPA gives the government new powers to go after sites that provide information about tools that might be used to bypass the blacklists — even though these are often the same tools used by democratic activists around the world to bypass Internet censorship mechanisms implemented by authoritarian governments like Iran and China." -- EFF.org

The largest copyright producers (the mass media giants, recording industries, and movie makers) would be able to dramatically overextend their reach into your freedoms. The internet has been used to save lives in every country of the world, it has helped overthrow deadly dictators and governments, and gives entertainment to you and your friends.

Some of the largest tech organizations and companies in the world are against these bills, for the damage they could cause: Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Mozilla Corporation, Roblox, Reddit, the Wikimedia Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the ACLU, and Human Rights Watch, Wired, Hacker News, Namecheap, ars technica, Wordpress, and thousands upon thousands of other websites are protesting today in opposition.

As atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, and other like minded people, I think it is vital we take a stand for free speech, and against censorship. Just as we've seen in countless other countries (North Korea, China, Australia, Iran, etc..) people deserve the ability to express themselves, openly.

These bills are dangerous and they need to never become US law. Sign the petitions, learn what you can do, or take part in the protests. Thank you.