If you feel as if your understanding of the two bills is sufficient or maybe you just don't care, this isn't for you, feel free to move on. I apologize for taking up any of your time and occupying a spot on your front page if this isn't something that interests you.

SOPA/PIPA are by no means new bills. They are just like many other bills that congress has seen, ever since people have made original content to mass produce and sell to consumers. These industries noticed that their consumers did not simply like to sit quietly and consume, but also share content among themselves, be it content inspired by what these corporations are producing, or entirely original content. All of it scared the corporations, and they wanted to preserve the state of the market they had in the early 20th century, with as little competition as possible, but they could not take legal action against anyone producing original content. What they can do, however, is try to stifle those of us who produce content based on preexisting content. Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act in 1992 which would forbid people from taping content aired on the radio and selling the content on a large sale, however, it did protect recording to share for free with friends. This is not what the media businesses wanted. They wanted congress to outlaw copying altogether. This bill was their last attempt to outlaw copying in that regard until 1998, with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act(DMCA). Many of you may have heard of "DMCA" before. It still exists of course, and has had its effect, but it has mostly not accomplished the goal of these companies. SOPA and PIPA are the largest attempts to achieve the same goal, modified versions of previous failed bills to compensate for how the internet works. They are American bills that plan to go anywhere in the world to censor content, and even if these bills fail to pass, more is coming. SOPA and PIPA are just new versions of a very similar bill that failed to pass just last year, and all of it begins with the DMCA falling short. SOPA and PIPA are not monumental events that the world will remember, they're another cog of a movement that has been going on for 20 years now.

I'm not going to sit here and type out any more, but I will leave anyone still interested with this,

http://www.ted.com/talks/defend_our....._bad_idea.html

Understanding the bills and what they are is important. It's purely embarrassing exploring the internet and seeing the majority of these "protest" submissions and "Spread the word!" documents clearly misunderstand what the bills mean, and what they will do. So stop it.

Thanks for your time!