1. Internet Privacy & Piracy
The entertainment industry - being given too much authority. Focused on profit margins.
Imposing censorship - Removing links to websites, preventing access, which would be easily possible
anyway. Charging internet providers to give access, causing dramatically higher rates for everyone.
Rather than making it easier to obtain content legally, making it harder to obtain content illegally. In
New Zealand - it is very difficult and expensive to purchase some content legally and digitally.
Everyone loses - people caught in the crossfire - making file sharing difficult and punishing
innocent peer-to-peer file-sharers by removing access to files (see MegaUpload case).
SOPA and PIPA -
Mass revolution from the internet -
Wikipedia, one of many free, online sources of information, would be highly censored, due to
mentioning copyrighted property (almost all media produced by studios) and hosting images based on
these, even fan made content so much as mentioning the characters or other property.
How does it affect us?
All sites hosted in the USA will go through the effects of SOPA and PIPA if they are passed, and other
countries (especially those with small internet use, like NZ) will almost definitely follow the USA’s
example and impose similar laws, if they are not forced to by the entertainment industry.