Fight against SOPA, PIPA

I've been thinking a lot about this SOPA and PIPA business lately. It is appropriate to say that most people have. I go back and forth on whether or not I think that the bill is totally worthy of the uproar it has produced (call me old school, but largely, our generation doesn't get royally peeved until someone threatens to take away our luxuries), but I'm glad to see that the masses are paying attention.

The thing about it that most frightened me was that Megaupload.com, a hugely popular file sharing website started in 2005, was shut down on Jan. 19. before any decision had been made in regards to SOPA or PIPA. In writing this column ,I typed the site name into my browser just to see what would show up, and I got a page displaying only the U.S. Department of Justice, FBI and IPR Center logos along with a message that read: "This domain name associated with the website Megaupload.com has been seized pursuant to an order issued by a U.S. District Court."

What. The. Hell. Seized? That's terrifying. It's not so much that I can no longer use Megaupload.com to satisfy my "American Horror Story" addiction, it's that our government took action on a bill that hadn't yet passed.

Of course, the website's history hasn't been totally clean. It has taken some hits in the past few years, being blocked in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in May 2010, Malaysia in June 2011 and India in July 2011. So, you could argue that they had it coming, that it would happen eventually. But aren't we supposed to be the progressive, forward-thinking Internet community? Isn't the Internet in this country supposed to be available for everyone to access whatever information they want?

Granted, I don't think that pirating is morally right. I do believe very strongly that artists who've made it far enough to get their albums produced or their shows on TV or their movies in theaters deserve all of the benefits they've worked so hard for. But I also believe in free access of information and it's a difficult argument to make, whether or not file-sharing websites should be wiped off the face of the Internet.

I guess the point is that it scares me to think that the day may be rapidly approaching when it's not just file sharing sites that are eliminated, it's also Wikipedia, Google, Firefox, news websites, gaming websites... how can we continue to develop, to innovate, to push forward as a society without free use of the internet? So much of what we as a society are capable of at this point in our existence revolves around what we can access online and without it we would be taking enormous leaps backwards.

So let's keep fighting this thing, alright?

Jordan Bean can be contacted at bean19@marshall.edu.