By now I'm sure everyone who hasn't been on vacation in a remote part of Antarctica has heard about SOPA/PIPA and the onslaught of protests from the public. The bills appear to be dead, or at least close to it by now. If somehow you managed to not hear about it, the intention was to make it easier to take down sites that host pirated content, but because of how broadly it was written sites such as YouTube could be taken down just because a user uploads something that contains copyrighted material. Legal action could be taken against something as trivial as a video being uploaded that has the radio playing a copyrighted song in the background. On top of that, sites would be blocked using DNS, this type of block can be circumvented by simply using the site's IP address instead of the domain name.

I'm sure everyone has heard far more than enough about this, so let’s get to the point, I'm writing this because it is just one of the things that need to be stopped in this world. A coworker brought up a good point the other day about how people need to stand up for the other things in this world that matter much more than SOPA/PIPA. Every day people go without food or clean water and a safe place to sleep at night in addition to so many other things. We have seen what effect we can have when people decide to unite and stand against something they believe is wrong. Think of what else could be changed for the better if the masses stood up for everything else that needs to change in this corrupted world.

Social networking sites have been flooded for weeks with posts on stopping SOPA/PIPA, but when was the last time you saw a post about helping the millions that don't even have the freedom to protest against their government? We all need to wake up from our egocentric way of life and not only stand up for the issues that affect us, but look around for what we all ignore unintentionally or choose to disregard. We have all become complacent in the freedoms we enjoy and have forgotten that someone had to take the stand and make the sacrifice for what we now have.