SOPA

Today sites such as Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla and Minecraft are going dark in protest of the SOPA and PIPA bills.

While I'm behind efforts to curb online piracy, I've been paying attention to how, at least in its original form, SOPA was poorly-defined, to the point of being open to abuse. I've read the stories about how it could lead to small online business being shut down, or someone's blog could be taken down for posting images from a movie they were discussing or links to the movie's homepage.

I've also seen that certain changes are being made to SOPA, like removing the US courts' ability to instruct ISPs to shut down sites based on the suspicion of copyright infringement. These are good things to hear, because it means someone is listening to the fears and is taking steps to better define exactly what SOPA is meant to do.

In the end, I know there's little my voice does compared to internet giants like Facebook, Google and Wikipedia. I'm not even sure I'm qualified to fully understand the scope of what SOPA means or offer reasonable suggestions as to alternatives.

What I do know is that, as a blogger, I rely heavily on the freedom to provide links to outside sources, so I would hate to see anything damage that. As an author, I would rather risk a few people pirating a digital copy of my book if it meant that those who bought and enjoyed my book could freely share that love and talk about it openly.

I hope that, whatever happens, we'll all still be able to share information and maintain this amazing global community which the internet has allowed us to create.