Michigan Exposures Joins the SOPA Protests

...sort of.  Many of the sites that are protest this potential law are completely blacking out.  I don't see the point of that as one of my main functions on this blog is education.

But at any rate, I figured I would join the other users in a protest of this law.  For me there are a few reasons for this.  Number one, of the things that are facing the country at the moment, I don't think online piracy is one of the major things.  So I don't understand why something like this gets fast tracked while so many more important issues are left to wallow.

Number two, I think this bill goes beyond what is necessary to protect our intellectual property.  There are already a number of laws on the books that are designed to protect intellectual property.  Rather than passing a completely new law that will probably end up being just as ineffective, they should look at the existing laws and figure out where to strengthen those.  Besides that, I am going to guess that many of the sites that are involved in heavy piracy are situated outside of the United States and are probably untouchable.

Number three, I do not like the idea of blacking out sites.  One of the biggest provisions of this law is the ability for someone to basically blacklist a website that is found to be violating the piracy laws.  This seems like something that is prone to abuse for other purposes.  History is full of examples of well intentioned laws getting abused.  I mean what's to stop one politician from using this law to black out a rival politician's website?

Number four, I don't think this will work as intended.  I get tons of spam...fortunately they go into a spam folder but I still have to deal with them at some level.  I also get spam comments on this blog and have occasionally seen spam posts.  Now if we can't stop that, what chance do we have against piracy?  It just seems like one tool comes up and the spammers (or virus writers) are a step ahead and have already defeated it.  I think the risk of collateral damage outweighs the "good" effects of this bill.

As I'm posting this, it seems like the momentum to get this bill passed has slowed down some.  So maybe there is hope.

 So this is my protest picture.  I wanted to do something that was uniquely mine and aircraft seem to fill the bill.  I was going to do a completely black picture but I don't think this bill will completely black out what it intends to black out.  Instead, it will obscure it and make it change form and we'll be back to square one.

However, I can't do a post without doing a decent picture.  So here it is.