SOPA: A Righteous Cause or a Piracy Crusade? Essay

In a sense, the bills would create an internet blacklist. These bills did not pass through congress due to mass protest by people. Multiple sites such as Google and Wikipedia had a day of ‘black out’ in order to raise public awareness of these bills, which in turn lead to the protests that prevented these bills from passing. Though the American people were successful in preventing those bills, there were others that were signed without the majority of the public knowing. An example of such a bill is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). ACTA has a very strict definition of copyright infringement, would require ISPs to monitor all your data traffic, force ISP to remove service from people who infringe copyrights (Solon). This act was approved by congress but was eventually denied by the UN. Whether or not ACTA will still be enforced in the United States is highly doubtful, but it may lead to further legislature advocating internet restriction. Such legislature could be the Trans-Pacific Trade Pact (TPP). With similar writing as ACTA and other internet censorship bills, however, a difference is that it includes pacific countries such as Japan, Mexico, and Australia. While the internet did extended the American peoples

Another advantage of the Act is that now communication between government agencies is much better. Prior to this they infrequently shared information from investigations; information is helping each agency better to catch the offenders. To better protect the people of the United States not only from terrorist who try to attack us but also other criminals.

The United States government changed the face of computer and internet use when it signed the USA Patriot Act on October 26, 2001. This act was created in the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11 that same year. Many people believe that this act is a good thing and will help in defense against any future attacks. What most people do not know, however, is the effect of this act on the more general public. This includes individual people, public libraries, colleges and universities, and even trucking or hauling companies.

This act gives the American people rights and benefits. For example: it will provide health coverage to adults and children with preexisting conditions, it will end lifetime and annual limits on health care policies, it will allow adults under the age of twenty-six to be carried by their parent’s health insurance, and it will provide preventive service access without cost.

This act,when described, seems to have a positive impact yet there are many issues concerning this act.

My reality was shattered as all my aspirations of making my life easier with the internet suddenly tumbled down into my stomach as it sank. I went back to working on my group project about an imaginary amendment being added to the constitution to strip the electoral college of its power. We were using google drive to streamline the work and I sank even lower to the ground. Google drive could be gone if a fat cat CEO decided something was wrong with google drive. This caused me to despise censorship. At this very moment I defined the scourge of humanity known as censorship as the denial of any piece of information or content to any person or persons who seek to find them. I was envigorated by this gut punch and starting to tell my family, friends, and teachers. I became so furious, but I also found out the rest of the internet was too. Huge companies such as Google, Wikipedia, and Mozilla were furious at the notion of limiting people's free speech and access to the internet. They organized an internet blackout out day where thousands of websites blacked out access to protest SOPA. This caused so much pressure and backlash on congress that they were forced to stop the bill. All my worries were washed away following this

The Act? The Patriot Act. The Patriot Act was signed by none other than George bush on October 6 2001, the act itself is abbreviated for uniting and strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism act of 2001. Now what this act contained was a series of amendments, or orders that a lot of aspects of modern society had to be monitored and recorded so that way another attack like 9/11 wouldn’t happen. Basically they enhance domestic security against terrorism, heightened surveillance procedures, increased border security, removing obstacles to investigate terrorism,and increased information sharing.They made a wall between everyone's life and theirs with a hug peep hole. Any sensible person would say that such action is for the national security of our country and it makes us a safer country. Although this does make for a huge security benefit for our country, it is sad to say that nobody really has true privacy. How much privacy do we really

On the recovery from the 9/11 attacks, the act institutes a new authority that America had not seen before. The act is all about the prevention of attacks not reacting to them. In addition, it has done more; broadening its influence to almost all crime, it convicts not only terrorists, but also drug lords, cyber attackers, and even thefts. The act also implemented a new and more efficient way of investigation and conviction. The PATRIOT Act is protecting what it means to be American. In the wise words of George Washington, "To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving

We have to approve the Cybersecurity Act in order to protect ourselves as American people, from predators and harmful online hackers. Cybersecurity is highly needed in today’s society since this generation is a high tech, online generation. Since everything is moving towards computers and technology, we will need to protect our information to keep us, (especially American people since everyone hates us for many sensible reasons, even Americans their selves) and the world safe. We need to do anything and everything we can to have protection against online hackers, predators, terrorists, and cyber-criminals who want to use our and the world’s information for evil. We must do what we can to stop them in their path to keep them from accessing our private information to share with others, or use against us.

The death of Aaron H. Swartz is a tragedy on many levels. First, because the life of a promising young man, and contributor to society, was needlessly cut short. Second, who knows how far this young man’s innovative mind, vision, and abilities could have gone towards improving the quality of life for the people of our current society? And third, because what happened to him, can and does occur to many others. Clearly, in his case, our government went on a witch hunt due to pressure brought on by wealthy and powerful organizations. Exacerbating this situation, most of the Congressmen supporting SOPA and PIPA had no real clue as to the dangerous and chilling affects that those bills would have created regarding access to the free flow of information on the Internet.

Censorship has been a touchy topic over the past few years. Everyone has their own opinion on the topic, but the fact is censorship is way more damaging than people may notice. First off, the definition of censorship is to restrain, block, and censor ideas and information that some may find offensive. The basic definition of censorship completely violates the First Amendment. We, as Americans, have the right to Freedom of Speech. Censorship blocks that by blocking anything some may find offensive. It’s not fair because they’re blocking out how people feel/think just because someone found it “offensive” or wrong. It completely contradicts the First Amendment. People have the right to know about the world and what’s happening. Keeping the

Since there has not been a ruling in this case, the supporters of the censorship laws had to try and find a way to get the internet censored to children. So in the year 2000, Congress passed the Children's Internet Protection Act, which is aimed at the computers in the schools and libraries that the children would have access to. This law was limited to "only the schools and libraries that participated in certain federal programs such as, receiving federal money for technology". The schools and libraries that received this money were required to "install filtering software on all internet terminals to block access to sites with child pornography, obscene material, and material that is harmful to minors". My opinion on this law is that it is even better than the firs one. They are very similar, as you can tell from their names, there is very little changed in the names of the laws. I think that the sites that a minor can look at should be filtered. This way they cannot look at things that can be harmful to them.

Analysis – Matthew Daly (Associated Press) reports that the bill is largely due to a report that found that the Freedom of Information process, enacted 50 years ago has multiple problems, including lack of communication from federal agencies, unreasonable redactions, and abusive fees. This type of action is part of a statutory law, which is enacted by legislation through the U.S. law system and written by a document by a government to define its powers

In 2011, several people started a “Don’t Filter Me project.” They wanted to remove the web filters on the school computers that blocked several educational sites. They filed lawsuits and demanded that they unblock these sites and take away the web filters. Also another group of people petitioned the Supreme Court to strike down the Communications Decency Act in Reno v. ACLU in 1997. As a result, the court granted the “highest level of First Amendment protection to the internet.” Also in 2004, the Supreme Court “announced that it will not hear government’s appeal of a ban on the Child Online Protection Act.” They thought of this as a violation of the First Amendment (Internet Censorship 1).

The rise of the Internet era opened the whole new market for traditional media full of opportunities as well as threats. Online piracy being one of them because the music and film industry loses £5.4bn in a year and if it was reduced by 10% it could have created up to 13 thousand jobs in the UK. There are various attempts taken to fight with online piracy; a case study of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement will be considered as well as other legislations attempting to regulate copyrights in the Internet. This