SOPA Blackout January 18th

Today, Simplistic Savings has joined with thousands of other bloggers and websites and are participating in the SOPA black out to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act. 

SOPABlackout.org has kindly provided the following information about the SOPA act.

What is SOPA?

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, H.R. 3261) is on the surface a bill that attempts to curb online piracy. Sadly, the proposed way it goes about doing this would devastate the online economy and the overall freedom of the web. It would particularly affect sites with heavy user generated content. Sites like Youtube, Reddit, Twitter, and others may cease to exist in their current form if this bill is passed.

What is PIPA?

The Protect IP Act (PIPA, S. 968) is SOPA's twin in the Senate. Under current DMCA law, if a user uploads a copyrighted movie to sites like Youtube, the site isn't held accountable so long as they provide a way to report user infringement. The user who uploaded the movie is held accountable for their actions, not the site. PIPA would change that - it would place the blame on the site itself, and would also provide a way for copyright holders to seize the site's domain in extreme circumstances.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation laid out four excellent points as to why the bills are not only dangerous, but are also not effective for what they are trying to accomplish:

• The blacklist bills are expensive. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that PIPA alone would cost the taxpayers at least $47 million over 5 years, and could cost the private sector many times more. Those costs would be carried mostly by the tech industry, hampering growth and innovation.
• The blacklist bills silence legitimate speech. Rightsholders, ISPs, or the government could shut down sites with accusations of infringement, and without real due process.
• The blacklist bills are bad for the architecture of the Internet. But don't take our word for it: see the open letters that dozens of the Internet's concerned creators have submitted to Congress about the impact the bills would have on the security of the web.
• The blacklist bills won't stop online piracy. The tools these bills would grant rightsholders are like chainsaws in an operating room: they do a lot of damage, and they aren't very effective in the first place. The filtering methods might dissuade casual users, but they would be trivial for dedicated and technically savvy users to circumvent.

Our friends over at Money Saving Parent have written an excellent article we would like to share with you, with their permission, of course!

Power corrupts: Absolute power corrupts absolutely, Lord Acton

Today as you visit Money Saving Parent you will notice our one and only post is this video regarding SOPA. While many sites are going "Black" in protest we would like to provide you with this information about this bill and encourage you to contact your representatives and Senators in protest of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) using the tools available to you at StopAmericanCensorship.org.


Now, trust me I'm one of the first people to just say "NO!" to copyright infringement. After all I'm just a one man show (woman) who gets by with a lot of help from her friends and family. Someone steals my content and I'm "out of business" however, SOPA doesn't actually work to save blog, websites or businesses large or small.

This article clearly shares seven problems with SOPA and why it hurts us all. Find out how this censorship can hurt those who use the Internet and protect none of us. Censorship laws like these have been enacted in Taiwan, Thailand and China.

If you think today is tough as sites like Wikipedia, Reddit and Craigslist as well as many other sites large and small go black, you will most probably be seeing red should this bill be approved.

Do you see the hidden dangers here?

Feel free to use our site today, enter some great giveaways and enjoy the money saving offers, coupons and tips posted earlier this week. We hope you will return tomorrow to visit us again as we go "live" with even more information to help you save for tomorrow and live for today!

Check out this video.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.