SOPA Censorships Sweetheart Essay - 1186 Words

â€Å"Imagine a world without free knowledge.† That was the quote on Wikipedia’s front page on Wednesday, January 18th. . The information-hosting online encyclopedia shut down all of the articles and information on the website, presenting only a black screen and a stark situation to the world for a full twenty-four hours. Why would Wikipedia, an online giant, shut down their website? The consequences are huge, a loss of much-solicited donations to the company and advertising money. The answer is simple. What Wikipedia is trying to do is raise awareness about two bills: the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, or SOPA and PIPA (Wikipedia, â€Å"Stop Online Piracy Act, Protect IP Act†). Soon after Wikipedia, other websites joined in the†¦show more content†¦A good example of this is the Vocaloid community. Vocaloid is a voice-synthesizer used to create songs that sound like a realistic human voice, with a cute anime (Japanese cartoon) character a ttached. (Vocaloid Wikia, â€Å"What is VOCALOID?†) In the Vocaloid community, one person might post a song that they created. Another person, with the permission of the composer, might create a music video for it using 3D modeling data by someone else, and post it on the same site. (Vocaloid Wikia, â€Å"MMD†) When an amateur singer sees the song, they might sing it, use the instrumental provided by the composer, the video by the artist, and their voice to create a unique collaboration. However, if SOPA and PIPA were put into practice, this whole creative process would stop at the music video because of the copyright laws (Wikipedia, â€Å"Stop Online Piracy Act†, â€Å"Protect IP Act†), and the community irreparably damaged. In this way, SOPA and PIPA would limit creativity online. Moreover, many small, innovated sites created by single users or a small collaboration would be taken down for such a simple thing such as not providing a link to their backg round image. In fact, the official site for SOPA did not cite their background image, and if the law was put into place, their website’s link would be taken down from search engines. (Wikipedia, â€Å"Stop Online Piracy Act†) Yet, background images are not the only problem. For many users of sites such