One of the drawbacks of the development of internet is the fact that the piracy has increased very much. There are numerous websites which host illegal copies of music, movies, games, and so on. A simple search on Google will lead you to those websites, one of the most popular being The Pirate Bay.
Pirated movies, TV series, music, and games have been available on the internet for years. For years Hollywood and the music entertainment business tried to stop the piracy. It seems that the problem gets worse with each passing year, as the computers are much faster than they were, and servers are getting more and more reliable. Almost all the pirate sites have the servers outside of the United States of America, so there is not too much which can be done about them.
Debates About Stop Online Piracy Act (Source: industryleadersmagazine.com)
However, it seems that two bills might be able to do something about them. These new bills intend to take measures against PayPal, ad servers, and search engines such as Google and Yahoo, which allow the pirate websites to exist. The bill is called Stop Online Piracy Act, and it has caused lots of distress. Mozilla, Google, and hundreds of companies fight against it. The reason for that is the fact that the bill is too ambiguous, and as a result too many things could be censored. The ones who protest against the law have stated that it violates the free speech law, and that it strengthens the belief that American censorship is too strict.
Of course, parties such as the Motion Picture Association of America, and the United States Chamber of Commerce support the bill. Both of the parties are willing to spend millions of dollars on advertisements supporting the bill. Tom Rothman, the co-chief executive of Fox Filmed Entertainment stated that the act is supporting and protecting the people who pay for a faulty product. He stated that people pay for something, and they receive something bad in return. For example, they pay for a pirated movie, and they receive a movie filmed with a hand camera. He stated that it is a theft what these websites are doing.
Debates About Stop Online Piracy Act (Source: gladworks.com)
It seems that the bill is loved in the Congress but hated on the Internet. One of the main problems of the bill is the fact that anyone can make a claim against a site, even if it is from the United States of America. If a website features a movie clip, or a game walkthrough, it could be taken down. Some of the websites which are endangered are YouTube, Facebook, and basically all the gaming websites.
I think it’s just another example of how the corporate and financing firms try to tell us what to do, use and accept in our daily lives. I, for one, do not want to pay for a bad movie, and I don’t trust reviews or reviewers, just because their opinion might be different from mine. I want my own opinion. So getting a camera filmed movie is a way of actually knowing if it’s okay to shell out my money.
All these big companies just want money for something you haven’t seen, heard of tasted before hand. I do not agree with that whatsoever.