hoo boy poluhtiks!

So for those of you recently released from a North Korean labor camp, you may have realized that many of your favorite sites have "gone black" in a protest of something called SOPAPILLA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act.

These two bills enable large corporations and their puppets (the Department of Justice and the Attorney General) to shut down websites guilty of piracy, or even facilitating piracy. For those of you who think that this might not affect you, here is a short list of the three top sites currently facilitating piracy that would get straight-up just prison shanked to bits if SOPA or PIPA were to pass.

If you're online, this affects you.

It categorizes sites as "foreign" or "domestic" based on the nationality of the registrar the website's domain suffix is registered in. For those of you who don't speak Horrible Geek, that means that www.london.org, which is a site run by the Londanian Sacrificial Tourist Aquisition Guild, in London, England, would be considered a "domestic" site and therefore subject to US law because the .org registrar is based in the United States.

No, seriously. And that's not even the worst part! It would also require search engines like Google to make sure they're not linking to any sites that have infringing material on them. Google, the same website that recently indexed their TRILLIONTH concurrent URL. Holy balls!

This very much is job killing regulations of the worst kind. I know that's bullshit dogwhistle politics, but in this case it's actually true.

Basically, if you're reading this site, you're probably well aquainted enough with the Internet to know this is bad. If that's not the case, then hi Grandma! Since you sent that box of oranges, I haven't gotten scurvy once!

First and foremost, you should read up on why these laws are bad news. Here's a letter from 108 professors explaining why this is the worst thing since MIT started offering free classes.

Congrats, you're now better informed than most of your representatives! Now what you need to do is contact your elected officials and disgorge yourself of this precious knowledge, like a mother bird feeding her children. If you don't trust yourself enough with words, here are two form letters you can send to your representatives instead.

Just fucking do something.