It’s Here…Google Drive

After 6 years in the making, the Google Drive is finally here.

But wait…what pray tell is the Google Drive you ask?

The Google Drive is a virtual folder that’s both local to the computer you’re using and virtual to an offsite server. The files, folders, and other types of information saved or dragged to the Google Drive folder can be access from anywhere with an internet connection and some sort of internet capable device, (e.g. Tablet, Phone, Laptop, Computer, etc.).

This sounds familiar…doesn’t it already exist?

Indeed it does.

Like many things at Google, they try to make good ideas even better.  Sometimes it works, many many times it doesn’t. With all of the online storage and cloud solutions being tossed around these days, such as DropBox, ADrive, and others, Google wanted a piece of the action and have since expanded their services into the virtual drive market with their Google Drive.

It’s pretty much identical to the DropBox system except they offer their storage solutions at a quarter of the price of their nearest DropBox competitor, and 5gb of storage space for free with a paid monthly service to expand the available storage space up to 16TB, can you imagine?

But what they don’t offer surprisingly is a referral to expand storage based on how many people are recommended yet. DropBox however does. Also slightly annoying is that it’s not yet ready. You have to apply for a Google Drive and with 24 hours they set up your drive. Also kind of annoying is that they share your space with your Google docs folder. That’s not cool. Or rather it would be if the docs were converted into *.doc files, but they remain in some sort of odd format called *.gdoc, then opens in a browser so long as your device is connected to the internet.

So which one is better?

That’s hard to say.

Mild annoyances aside, the DropBox and Google Drive solutions are pretty much identical. And when your this late to the party solutions either have to be significantly different and significantly better to get users to give up their current solution for another. Currently, I don’t believe the Google Drive pricing structure alone is going to capture many converters from DropBox and they may have to focus on the new markets or integration of their current services within the Google Drive system. You do get more space with Google Drive for the same price but….eh.

The Google has the potential to be awesome, but at the moment it’s just not there.

DropBox was way ahead of it’s time and is still awesome to this day. To find out how to install DropBox, check out this video on YouTube .

So why is Google just coming out with this now?

That’s a fine question.

It seems with all of the resources at their disposal, this sort of thing would be a weekend project at Google doesn’t it? But it took them over 6 years to get it working right. Which in itself wouldn’t be that depressing if it wasn’t compounded by the fact that it was already built by a third party developer 9 years ago.

That’s right!

There use to be a little free application called the GDrive that performed pretty much the exact same way that the Google Drive Performs now and shares the storage space used with your Gmail account. Also, there’s a paid application that’s been available for a while called the gdocsdrive (exact same thing as Google Drive) which now will be superfluous with the free solution available. The point is that Google had the opportunity to crush DropBox before it was even a thing back in the day, and now they’re struggling to catch up.

Either way, now that it’s here, Google Drive is here to stay.

Download both and make your own decision from the links on our Downloads page.

I could hardly believe it.

For those that missed this years 420 celebration, you’re not alone. The semi-traditional, semi-protest, semi-spectacle of the 420 celebration on the CU boulder campus was officially closed down this year.

Now I’m not a pot smoker in any regard, but I do enjoy the spectacle of watching the 15k some odd people meandering in the Norlin quad with the intention of a unified pot smoking celebration at 4:20pm. But for some reason can’t seem to agree upon whose clock to run off of, probably due to the pot, which results in a 15 minute window of pot smoking. Followed by several hours of wondering around town.

People smoking pot in Boulder Colorado isn’t anything to write home about.

After all the sheer amount of abuse of the Med card system and amount of dispensaries that have cropped up in the last few years is staggering. What is interesting are the folks that make a pilgrimage to Boulder be apart of one the largest gatherings of pot smokers in the country.

In the 6 years that I’ve been in Boulder, the University of Colorado has tried in many ways to curb “unflattering behavior” on 420. From field construction during the demonstration, to “secret spys” that would take pictures of students and ask people to turn in their friends for reward money. Issuing tickets to “trespassers” and other various methods.

But this year, in quite possibly the most flagrant display of misappropriated funds every 300 officials from police, to paramedics, to members of the fire department were posted around the quad set to protect it from nefarious activities.

After a few interviews with several officials that had all been standing around in packs of 4 for several hours, they informed me that they we’re all being paid overtime or event rates to “protect” the quad from trespassers. Moreover, the police had purchased several super burly go cart looking things to speed about campus in which works out to about $100k easily for 4 hours of hanging about. All to protect against unflattering behavior.

It was a sad day indeed, not for the death of the 420 celebration, but for the death of the rebellious spirit that had been associated with 420 at CU. Even with 300 law enforcement officials 10k-15k people could have easily over powered them. But the yellow tape proved to be an indelible line that had broken the indomitable spirit.

Save for one person standing on the sidelines that would not go quietly into that goodnight. And at 4:20ish he crossed the yellow tape in a full on sprint to the field to take a drag of a marijuana cigarette before being tackled by several police. His zeal was not repeated by onlookers but his courage was admirable.

People will always find places to smoke pot. But they won’t always have the ability to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Even if it’s not all for the same reasons. Whats more is that this years display speaks volumes of the ability for the establishment to bend the rights of the individual when they interfere with the interests of the state.

How far do they have to push us before we push back?

RIP 420, death of a spirit.

…way to go Apple

After your last fiasco with Final Cut Pro X, you reinforced your stellar product line as of late with the much anticipated all new, all awful 10.7 Lion OSX.

How about this, next time you get the urge to upgrade your older products, don’t. Or better yet, take a survey. Find out what features people love about your old products and leave them in there. Or give people the option to keep the old features they love. Don’t just remove stuff completely.

Top 5 Reasons Lion Sucks

1. You can’t buy Lion in Stores.

Yeah I said it. As of the time this written, Lion is only available online. Meaning you can only download the program after purchase. In other words, it never comes on a DVD, you have to either burn the ISO or DMG to a blank disk, external dive, or restore the image to memory stick. I guess Apple just assumes that everyone they need care about has a dedicated high speed connection, and can just pull down the 4.0 GB + file and figure out how to install it themselves, nice one

2. Default Reversed Scrolling

Now this may not sound like such a big deal but when you just reverse the direction of scrolling that’s been the same since the beginning of time, it gets really annoying really fast. Especially if you’re going back and fourth between different platforms of computers on a daily basis, like moi. Imagine if all of a sudden the United States switched the direction of just freeways, so that you’re driving on the opposite side of the road, but all the other roads are normal. It’s like…why would you do that. I guess apple is going more toward touch screen technology and wants to incorporate all the functionality into their laptops too. Hey how about leaving my laptop like a laptop and my touch screen like a touch screen, yeah?

3. No Spaces Function

If you don’t know what spaces are, its a feature of Mac OSX that allows you to have multiple instances of desktops running simultaneously. They got rid of that and replaced it with some weird version called mission control.  Something that shrinks your current desktop down and opens all of the open windows in a thumbnail view  around the shrunken background. Not an improvement, not even a lateral change. It’s too bad because I loved that thing, can I have it back? Not the smoothest move on Apple’s part.

4. Right click mouse pad or two finger right click

This just perplexes me. Especially if you have a laptop with a touchpad, in 10.6 you can right click with the bottom right corner of the mousepad and use 2 fingers to right click, and hit control click to right click. In 10.7 you have to pick one. What was wrong with the system that was there? It was fine, it was cool. It didn’t work all the time, but I could always try another way if the first way didn’t work. Now, not only does it still not work all the time, but also I have to remember which one I chose to right click every time. You can’t just try both ways to make it go. Bizarre.

5. Applications folder has been replaced by launchpad

We get it, you’re progressive. You want to change everything to be uniform with touch screen technology. It’s like they’re just blatantly trying to make MacBooks into iPads. But news flash, my macbook is a macbook, my imac is an imac. I don’t need to use the same operation on my phone as I do on my G5, it was fine the way it was.

But it’s not all bad, Apple has done a few cool things from a developer perspective. It’s faster, some things are snappier, but nothing that would necessitate a whole new OS.

I give it a 1 star out of 10 Switching back to 10.6

Not the delicious Spanish dish we all know and love, I’m talking about HR 3261 Stop Online Piracy Act.

In the event that you’ve missed what SOPA is all about or if you haven’t had a chance to read the bill, don’t worry, neither has most of congress.  All you need to know is that several bills like it are currently being rushed through congress (SOPA, PIPA, the OPEN act, etc.) that are going to give corporations and the government absolute power to control/censor the internet in the United States.

Various theories have been tossed around for why the government would even consider a bill that would very clearly violates first amendment rights. Some claim it’s about jobs, others maintain it’s about safety and national security, but at the end of the day it’s really only about money.

Content creators (corporations) are upset that music, movies, and other forms of media are being pirated illegally by people online and feel that limiting Internet access to certain sites will drive revenue back into their industries. There’s talk that congress has been enjoying political campaign contributions to rally against this bill (a.k.a. legal bribery). Some even suggest companies that generated advertising revenue by supplying the software to download illegal content initially are the same ones that are now supporting the bill to outlaw piracy.

Opposition coming from major internet moguls such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, eBay, Wikipedia, and others as well as political figures such as Al Gore and Hilary Clinton suggest that congress’s lack of understanding of how the internet works should be more than enough to stop this bill and argue that censorship of the internet would put the United States’ access to information par with the most oppressed countries in the world. Too bad the house doesn’t feel the same.

There may be a lack of technical knowledge in the legislative process, but let me clear, these guys aren’t stupid. I mean sure, people in Congress aren’t the brightest bulbs on the tree, but their actions up to this point suggest that meticulous steps have been taken to ensure this bill will pass. The author of the bill, Lamar Smith (R. from Texas, huge surprise) tried to sneak this bill passed the house during the holidays (and almost did) before being met with vehement opposition. The wording in the bill has been carefully chosen to seem just vague enough to be interpreted in many ways, one of which is that it would be opposing job creation to oppose SOPA for lawmakers. Major newscasters (with the exception of CNN) have remained suspiciously silent about covering this story to avoid panic amongst the US population. Even after industry expert testimony on the subject have voiced clear opposition to the bill, more than ¾ of the house is still in support of HR 3261.

I take issue with that.

A wave of online insurgence has risen from the potentially crippling affect this bill will have on the Internet. Hundreds of videos, thousands of online posts, and scores of digital petitions and boycotts have cropped up in opposition of HR 3261. But for the millions of Americans it will directly affect, these efforts aren’t even close to enough.

To fight back there’s been talk of a nuclear option amongst the major Internet companies such as Google, Amazon, eBay, facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, etc. for a 24 blackout period of service slated for January 23rd. 2012 in protest of the Bill. At stake is the risk of losing millions in profits for a day of denial of service, but if this bill passes, those same companies risk losing their business entirely.

Here’s the ironic part.

The US government already has the ability to take websites offline in the US whenever they want. The most recent example was hundreds of websites that were blacklisted just before Black Friday and Cyber Monday because the “US feared that money for counterfeit products would be used to fund terrorist activities”

…a bit of a stretch, but I’ll buy it. Case in point, if the US government wanted to take websites down, they could.

The entertainment industry wants the same ability requesting extraordinary powers to block site they feel are infringing on copyright and argue that loss of revenues due to online piracy leads to loss of jobs, hurts the economy, and encourages cyber terrorism.

…that one is a bit harder to swallow.

Exaggerated estimations aside, the reality is that if a person illegally downloads a movie or song that they would’ve never downloaded otherwise, the losses to an industry are unclear.  But the benefits however, are.

Secretary of State Clinton said, “…when ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled, and people constrained in their choices, the internet is diminished for all of us”

I’m not advocating for or against piracy. But I will say with absolute certainty that no bill, no law, no technology, no amount of effort from any entity will ever stop piracy.  Butchering the internet is not a way forward for America.

I, like many americans, am a staunch advocate for freedom of speech with all of the benefits and detriments therein.  You have to be willing to take the good with the bad. Industries can blame what they like on what they don’t, but if the fabric of the Internet is unraveled, progress for the future of America is unraveled with it.

This is a very serious and very real threat to personal freedoms, and there’s not much time left. Tell everyone you know. Write your congressman. Sign petitions. Watch for other bills like it  (there will be others), and fight the good fight with us.

This legislation must not stand. Do not let SOPA pass!

Godaddy retracted it’s support for the anticonstitutional bill, but it was already too late.

Past actions speak louder than recent words. Godaddy showing support for such an act display at best violent ignorance, or at worst malicious intent.

Companies like GoDaddy even in brief support of SOPA need to know that the online community will respond. It’s time to make an example of GoDaddy. Here’s how to Boycott them.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Transfer Domains Out Of GoDaddy (reposted from jeffepstien’s blog)

Follow these step-by-step directions to transfer all of your domains from GoDaddy to Anyone Else.

Step 1: Login to GoDaddy and get to the domain manager.

Step 2: Select all domains

Step 3: Click on the “Locking Icon”

Step 4: Uncheck “lock domains”

Step 5: Find the tools tab —> “exportable lists”

Step 6: Click on “Add New Export” button

Step 7: Select “All My Domains” as the list type

Step 8: Check the “Authorization codes” box

Step 9: Generate the Exportable List

Step 10: Create account at another provider

Step 11: Go to “transfer domain”

Step 12: Enter domains you wish to transfer & click “transfer”

Step 13: Checkout

Step 14: Update EPP (Authorization code) code from GoDaddy Export File

Step 15: (Back at GoDaddy) Chose “Pending Transfers”

Step 16: Check all the domains (note: not all of the domains are not showing up yet, this takes a few hours apparently…)

Step 17: Check the “Accept” button and approve!

Step 18: Adios Godaddy!

Step 19: Transfer Complete (about 6 hours later)

Please do your part and help protect the Internet.

The Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA)

or HR 3261 could quite possibly the beginning of the end of free speech and the internet in America. The text can be found here.

I didn’t pay much attention to this bill because I thought it was a joke at first. But in the event you’ve missed what SOPA is all about, the new house bill 3261 is being touted by proponents as an amendment that is meant to

“give the government extra ordinary power to request internet service providers to restrict sites that infringe on copyright material, and prosecute people that violate the copyright of intellectual property”

Put another way, it gives the US government absolute power to censor the internet.

I’m not joking.

If passed any complaint of copyright infringement made about a website is enough for the government to intervene and block entire sites without notice.

whats so bad about that?

everything.

Bill HR 3261 introduced by Lamar Smith R. from Texas (as if anyone was surprised) if passed will effectively destroy the right to free speech, cripple the digital economy, and put the United States’s access to information on par with the most oppressed nations on the planet. It will give the attorney general the ability to block websites that are infringing on copyright material and bring domestic sites found in violation to court punishable under a bunch of sections of the US Code.

well that doesn’t sound so bad.

it gets better.

Don’t get this confused with censoring profanity or pornography (although it will be well within the governments power to do so), this bill enables the government to block access to entire websites if any part of the website is found in violation of either infringing on copyrights or facilitating the infringement on copyrights or complained about infringing on copyrights. But it doesn’t just stop at copyrights.

what counts as a copyright.

anything.

Work of sufficient originality that can be produced in a tangible medium is eligible for a copyright. For example you can’t copyright an idea, but if you type that idea up, or scribble it on a napkin with a piece of charcoal, it counts as intellectual property.

Copyrights also apply to poems, medicine, plays, paintings, dances, musicals, photographs, audio recordings, sculptures, software, radio and television broadcasts, industrial designs, maps, recipes, graphic design, logos, charts, journal articles,  blogs, children’s monster drawings, tweets, status updates, short stories, song lyrics, emails, and anything else written/created/or otherwise produced anywhere by anyone at anytime.

what counts as infringement or facilitating infringement?

anything.

If any part of any website has any of the above that wasn’t created by the author of the site, or has the express permission from the creator of any of the above to be published on a website, that entire site can be shut down. For example, if you want to show your friends vacation photos online and one picture is of a famous painting, it can be deemed copyright infringement for unlicensed use of the painting’s image. Not only can your entire site be shutdown, you’d be subject to violations punishable by law.

OR

If any part of any website promotes the infringement of any of the above, say a search engine that happens to lead you to the location of copyright material. All of them for example. Or a digital payment site that support the advertising on sites that have copyright material. All of them for example.

OR

If you cover a song you liked and post a video on some sort of video sharing site for example, that entire site can be shut down and you can be sued for that copyright infringement. Yeah that’s right.

You can shut down a site if you posts copyright material to another site, you and the owner of the site may be subject to violations punishable by law. 

Now, companies and governments might not go after the people posting pictures of their vacations or singing their favorite songs. These people are mostly looking to increase revenue by preventing the free flow of information from other countries and internally withing our own country. But where do you draw the line? And more importantly, why not? How do you determine which copyrights are okay to infringe upon and which are not. If all it takes is a complaint of infringement, and whole sites can be shut down without even notifying the owner of the site, then nothing is safe.

OH yeah, almost missed that part. If any part of a website is found in violation of copyright infringement, there is no notification necessary prior to a complete removal of the website.

Now you many be asking yourself…

isn’t there supposed to be laws against these kind of laws?

yeah, loads of them.

The most prominent of which would be that little thing call the first amendment of the constitution that states

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

Theres also things like the fair use act, the copyright act of 1976, and the many protected classes under the bill of rights.

To combat this anti-constitutional issue, Lamar Smith wrote in the very first few pages of the bill that

Nothing in this Act shall be construed to impose a prior restraint on free speech or the press protected under the 1st Amendment to the Constitution.

And, to be fair, since the first concerns that this new act will be crippling the internet and violating civil liberties, people have been trying to curtail the wording of the act to limit the slippery slope of violations into the right to free speech.

But the challenge in changing the wording of the act to fit within the current constraints of the constitution, is not that it’s simply difficult, it’s that it’s impossible.

There is and can be no distinction between telling someone what is not okay to see on the internet and the violation of the first amendment.

why would anyone ever think this is a good idea?

Because Lamar Smith is the biggest douche on the planet, and everything is bigger in Texas.

In case you haven’t heard of Lamar, he’s known for his stances on such popular topics as the support of the Abortion Pain bill that would

ensure that women seeking an abortion are fully informed regarding the pain experienced by their unborn child

Also the Child Interstate Abortion Notifaction Act which

prohibits taking minors across State lines in circumvention of laws requiring the involvement of parents in abortion decisions.

His run at the digital copyright game in 2006 with DMCA which

expand the DMCA’s restrictions on software that can bypass copy protections and grant federal police more wiretapping and enforcement powers.

And his stance on the end of the marijuana prohibition act of 2011

Marijuana use and distribution is prohibited under federal law because it has a high potential for abuse and does not have an accepted medical use in the U.S., The Food and Drug Administration has not approved smoked marijuana for any condition or disease.

I think this bill should be repealed from consideration if for no other reason than the fact that Lamar Smith shouldn’t count as a person.

Seriously, what’s this guy’s deal? Politicians have felt the pressure from industries looking for a way to combat the “injustices on the internet” for a while, but aside from Lamar, not many are going to even broach the idea of challenging the right to free speech. But because he was already against abortion, gay marriage, drugs, and pro cracking down on digital media, and forcing underage irresponsible children to bring more children into the world, he probably figured, “Hey why not challenge the first amendment”

All the while Smith make such smug self-satisfying comments about the bill such as

I am pleased that the unfounded claims of critics of the Stop Online Piracy Act have overwhelmingly been rejected by a majority of House Judiciary Committee members.

And

Not one of the critics was able to point to any language in the bill that would in any way harm the Internet.  Their accusations are simply not supported by any facts.

Great idea Smith, call out the people that have nothing but time on their hands to go through every page of this diatribe and find every loophole in it. (I’ll get back to this in a second, more quotes first, here’s one of my favorites).

 “There is a vast virtual market online run by criminals who steal products and profits that rightly belong to American innovators. These foreign rogue websites not only steal movies and music, they offer counterfeit medicine, automobile parts and even baby food, which harm American industries and put American lives at risk.

JESUS NO!

Not baby food and automobile parts. You know, now that I think about it, never once in my life have I had my car fixed and thought to myself, “I should really be paying more for these parts!” Why do you thinks people go online to find cheaper parts? In a time of economic disparity, it’s more important than ever to find deals where you can.

In fact, why is it when the someone pays full price for a product off a shelf in a store they feel like they’re getting screwed, because most people know they can buy things online for much cheaper perhaps.

Don’t get the wrong idea, I understand that brick and mortar stores can’t compete with online prices when you factor in rent, employees, insurance, etc. But there’s a stark difference between charging a little more and paying for the convenience, and charging an insane amount more just because. The free market should determine the price of a good. Not the government.

Here’s a good one

According to estimates, IP theft costs the U.S. economy more than $100 billion annually and results in the loss of thousands of American jobs

Nailed it Smith! Good job, you found the cause for the loss of american jobs. People downloading episodes of the Simpsons off the pirate bay because they missed it during the week from working two jobs. Couldn’t be any other reasons.

A few familiar companies that oppose this bill include:

Anyone else see a pattern here?

I’m not saying that one sides opinions are more or less valid than the others, but when it comes to matters of the future of the internet, I gotta go with the home team on this one.

but downloading illegal content or buying counterfeit goods/medications hurts the poor defenseless software, fashion, medical, and entertainment industries.

yeah, we know.

Maybe instead of business as usual or trying to fight back, the industry should try to embrace the change like netflix, spotify, iTunes, hulu or any of the other services. The technology wasn’t new or different, it was just welcomed. Then those companies went on to integrate the software into gaming consoles and peripheral devices to allow more users to use their services.

What was so bad about that model?

Some people just want to be able to watch movies or TV when they want to watch them, some people may not want to pay for the fluff songs used to finish out a record, some just plain can’t afford the cost of digital media, but that doesn’t stop them from spreading the word about it. Artist should be stoked that their work makes so many people happy. And if its good people will still pay to go see shows and buy shirts and such.

And for software people, how about not charging $1699 for Adobe CS5 or maybe make a Final Cut Pro that actually works before you release it. How hard was it to transition from Windows Vista to Windows 7, and why the hell is Lion 10.7 backwards scrolling?

Maybe medication shouldn’t cost $22/pill or handbags shouldn’t be sold for $1200 a purse. Maybe the United States is looking in the wrong direction to enforce laws.

The entertainment industry had two options when faced with this problem, and they picked the wrong one. 

Give people what they want and they’ll respond. Don’t give people what they want and they’ll respond too.

but how would companies make money if they didn’t charge for things?

I’m not saying don’t charge for things. I’m saying re-evaluate the way people charge for things, the mediums that they’re disseminated from, and the values that companies that create products are founded upon. At the end of the day if people are crossing the border into canada to afford medication to live, maybe it’s time to take another whack at that pricing structure.

Of course if you’re a christian scientist like Lamar Smith, that wouldn’t really affect you.

well if this bill passes then money will go back to the hands of the people that created the work, instead of foreign websites that allow free downloads and sell adspace on their sites right?

First off, people will always ALWAYS find a way to download copyright material. Always. Second, when you give the government the ability to deny access to domains, you open a pandora sized box shared  by the most oppressed countries in the world. Copyright material is where it starts. But the definition is so loosely based that entire sectors of the digital community can be shut down at the flip of a switch. Any attempt to pander to the opposition will create loopholes that anyone will be able to get through.

PLUS, there’s no way for anISP to block one part of a domain and not another. But even if there was, do you really want the government deciding what constitutes infringement?

Opponents complain that under the new bill, people like Justin Beiber would be in jail for singing copyright songs on the internet before he got his start. Personally, I’d support a bill that puts Justin Beiber in Jail, but that’s only a small part of what the bill is actually about.

the new bill is going to “promote prosperity creativity entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of US property, and for other purposes”

Let’s just call it what it is.

American businesses are losing sales due to the ability to find cheaper means to obtaining goods on the internet. That’s what the free market is about. That’s one of the main tenets that this country was founded on. The free market decides whats what. This bill monopolizes the free market within the United States.

but I don’t even really download content, watch youtube, buy counterfeit handbags, need medication, read wiki-leaks, use recipes online, lookup reviews, or use Facebook at all so this doesn’t really affect me.

Wrong!

When you give the US government the ability to block sites at will, they can control the media and tell us what is okay and what’s not okay to see online.

Ever hear of the Massacre at Tienanmen Square in China? Because the Chinese haven’t. And when you don’t even know about the things you don’t know about, you can’t fight against them.

but I don’t live in the United States so this doesn’t really affect me

When money is involved it affects everyone.

If SOPA passes, and returns however many millions back to the entertainment, software, medical, and fashion industries, how long do you think it will be before other countries start following suit?

This has to stop now. People have already been arrested under the DMCA, now it’s gone too far.

but I’m only one person, if the government wants to pass it, I can’t do anything about it?

I’m one person too, but you found this article.

You can tell everyone you know about SOPA, copy and paste this message on your own sites. Sign the petition at Whitehouse.gov This is one of the biggest blows to the right to free speech in our generation. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Lamar Smith is trying to sneak it by the house right before the holidays? Not so many people are talking about it because most are preoccupied with other stuff.

People need to know about this, shout out against it, and give people that think SOPA is a good idea a smack in the mouth. Its easy to become complacent with the level of free speech we enjoy in the United State because we’ve never had to do anything to defend it. Freedom is only assumed until it’s taken a way. The true test of its strength is lengths that people will go to get it back once lost. Liberty lies in the hearts of the people. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.

Keep the internet free! Down with SOPA!