Fellow Fishes, we’ve come today to discuss a serious topic. A bill titled “Protect IP Act,” or PIPA, is being evaluated by Congress right now. They started hearings for the bill on Wednesday, November 16 (yesterday at the time of this article). There is another bill in congress, called “Stop Online Piracy Act,” or SOPA, that is meant to be combined with the PIPA bill. What these bill call for is basically for sites like BitTorrent or other sites like this that provide illegal content to be shut down. Thing is, these bills are too broad in defining what a “rogue” site is. Anyone can be defined as a “rogue.” The Entertainment Industry is the one that wants these bills to pass, for they feel DMCA is not enough for them. In trying to “Protect IP” and take down sites with copyrighted material on it, they will instead hurt the internet and what makes the internet awesome. Currently, under the DMCA, anyone who has copyrighted material on their site is given time to take down the offending material. The worse that could happen is you’d be fined. With PIPA and SOPA, it will be a felony to have a video of you singing karaoke, and be put in jail for 5 years. That’s right, you will be no better than that crackhead down the block, or that rapist on the loose. To make matters worse, these bills are set to fly through congress. This KYM article (and the video in it) can explain things in better detail.

While we at The Wired Fish don’t support piracy, this is not the way to combat it. Sites like 4chan, Know Your Meme, DeviantART, Wikipedia, Mozilla, Facebook, 9gag, Halolz, the Channel Awesome network, ScrewAttack, etc. would be affected, and even shut down. Youtube will be a largely different place to be in. NicoNico will be gone as quickly as they started. Let’s Players like Chuggaconroy and ProtonJon will be gone. Smaller sites like us would have to leave, and our videos taken away. These bills cannot pass!

Do your part and send a letter to congress (trust me it doesn’t take that long). These bills will change the internet as we know it, and it won’t be pretty. Do you want the internet to be like China’s? (no offense). Do you want the internet to be run by a bunch of little Shinra Corps.? Then stand up and knock this bill out. We got one bill knocked out. We can do it again!