Clay Shirky SOPA

I was completely unaware of Congress trying to have so much control over our social networking and file sharing until watching this video. Clay Shirky began his TED talk by giving the scenario of a bakery going out of business because they could no longer use printed sheets of cartoon characters. The defense for this? This was considered "copyrighting".

Shirky goes on to explain that congress has passed SOPA. Basically, SOPA is like our internet police. Now of days we share videos, music, pictures, etc. on social networking sites making any type of digital media available to us world wide. That's what you're supposed to be able to do on social networks, right? Wrong. Congress wants to put a stop to that. They basically want to sell us these items that would usually allow us to have access to all these social networking sites but not allow us to use them in the way that we have (free music, videos, etc.).

For me, I think that SOPA is a bad idea. To an extent, I do think that Shirky has a point . File sharing is something I actually take part in on a daily basis, mostly with music. My friends are always sharing new music with me and vice versa. This does save me money to a sense but it's mostly done because I rarely ever want an entire album from an artist. Same thing with movies, I don't think anyone is a fan of wasting money. Movie theaters here are nearly ten dollars just to see a movie. Nothing is more annoying than spending that much money to see a movie that didn't turn out to be so good. These files being available to us on the internet eliminates that. I don't think that file sharing is something that is mallicious, for me it's just to save money.