The SOPA madness takes us to the dark side of Internet

On SocialMediaToday’s darkened site, they left a short but very clear message to their audience about their opinion in this matter:

“Today Social Media Today joins others in the Internet community by going dark in protest of SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act.” We respect the rights of every creative person to profit from their own work, and we deplore the mindset that digital media somehow free us from an obligation to respect the livelihoods of content creators, but SOPA is a misconceived bill that shouldn’t even go back to the drawing board.
Although it now appears that the SOPA bill is dead for this term, we are confident that its well-funded supporters will be back to fight again, and registering our displeasure with ill-considered measures to restrict innovative content contributors remains important.
We agree with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) when it says, “this bill cannot be fixed; it must be killed.”

”Mashable is not darkened (yet) but on the other hand, the journalist Lance Ulanoff says : “SOPA Will Take Us Back to the Dark Ages”.

Lance says he had an epiphany today, and writes:

“Behind the almost unreadable (yet truly scary) text of SOPA (and its Senate doppelganger, PIPA, or the Protect Intellectual Property Act) is a desire, likely fueled by powerful media conglomerate backers, to take us all back to the thin-pipe, content-distribution days of 1994 — right before the World Wide Web launched.”

If you wonder what SOPA is all about, you can read Dan Rowinskis article “What You Need to Know About SOPA in 2012” in ReadWriteWeb. And join the revolution.

And not to forget Clay Shirky’s TED talk: “Why SOPA is a bad idea”

Finally – I do share Jeff Jarvis concern “that The Times’ tech guy, +David Pogue, would see the SOPA fight, in some quarters, as about free movies when it’s really about freedom, about not mangling the architecture of the net for one industry’s aims and in the process limiting speech and our greatest tool for speech ever.” (The quotation is taken from Google+). When it comes to David’s article: “Put Down the Pitchforks on SOPA“.