UPDATED 15:12 EDT / JANUARY 10 2012

NEWS

Boycott SOPA Supporters With New Android App

Quick Recap: Last year, lawmakers were so intent on finding a solution to stop piracy.  They came up with  Protect IP Act or PIPA, Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA, and finally ”The Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade” or OPEN Act.  All those bills are against piracy and counterfeiting but none of them aren’t getting the approval of consumers.  Supporters believe that it would protect the intellectual property market and corresponding industry, jobs and revenue, and is necessary to bolster enforcement of copyright laws especially against foreign websites.  But antagonists believe that it goes against the First Amendment rights, is considered as Internet censorship, will cripple the Internet, and will threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech.

No More SOPA published a list of companies supporting SOPA.  If you think that this is not something that concerns you, think again.  If the SOPA bill is passed, doing a search on the Internet would never be the same again.

SOPA supporters are getting the cold treatment from consumers like GoDaddy.  Though they revoked their support after customers threatened to boycott their service, some customers still ditched them.

If you’re against SOPA and you’re using an Android device, you can easily spot which products are from SOPA supporters or related to them with the use of an app.

The Boycott SOPA app is a “free android application that you can use to scan bar codes to help identify if products are either created by or intimately related to SOPA supporting companies,” developed by “two college kids that are unimpressed with the current SOPA bill and want to discourage it from getting passed in any way possible.”

No news yet if an iOS app would be available soon.  Apple Inc. used to support SOPA but retracted their support back in December.

Yes, SOPA is a big deal if you still haven’t figured that out.  With this Android app, more SOPA supporter or even those associated with them could face massive loss of consumers. So now, more companies are voicing out their opposition for the bill.

Capcom clarified that ESA, a group comprised of many game developers including Capcom, supports SOPA but Capcom do not have a stance on the bill.

Online News Association President Christine Montgomery is anti-SOPA as stated on her letter, “ONA strongly condemns infringement of intellectual property and the violation of copyright. However, we believe SOPA would do little to stem those problems and would actually cause harm to the Internet and to the American public.

Even ex-presidential candidate Al Gore is anti-SOPA.  In a now-deleted YouTube video, Gore warned that proposals to levy an Internet death penalty against allegedly piratical Web sites “would very probably have the effect of really shutting down the vibrancy of the Internet.”

NetCoalition, a group composed of top web companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Paypal, Zynga, Yahoo etc., is rumored to be planning a temporary service shutdown as a way of opposing SOPA.

“Internet and technology companies will continue to educate policymakers and other stakeholders on the problems with the (legislation),” Markham Erickson, director of Web trade association NetCoalition, said in a statement. “An ‘Internet blackout’ would obviously be both drastic and unprecedented.”


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