Oppose SOPA and PIPA

Why is my logo blacked out? Maybe you’ve heard that our government is trying to turn this country into a police state. The latest attacks on our freedom, or at least the biggest ones that affect us on the Internet, are SOPA and PIPA, one each for the House and the Senate.

I’d love to tell you more, but there are so many other web sites that can explain it better. I never understand all the legaleze in these government things. I’m convinced they deliberately write bills so that no one can understand them. In this case, people were paying attention. There has been discussion and protest to these bills on the Internet for quite a while.

These two bills are supposed to be about protecting copyrights and such, or so the Congress thinks, but really it just makes any web site guilty until proven innocent. I’m all for copyright protection, especially with the number of sploggers we’ve seen just in the genealogy blogger community, but even in my somewhat limited understanding of these bills, I know that they’re going about it the wrong way.

And so many web sites are going dark for 18 January 2012 to protest, including Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit. So hang on over to those sites to read more about this, if you want to know more.

So why is this blog my only site to go dark and why didn’t I make the whole thing go away? Well, if every page on every site went dark, you wouldn’t actually know what was going on because there’d be nothing to explain it. Right? OK, maybe I’m being a little bit lazy, but those big sites have been planning for this while I’ve been procrastinating. Even this blog post is less than an hour until “protest day” begins in my time zone. In any case, at least I’ve been helping to spread the word via social networking, and I’m doing it now on my blog as well.

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