Internet Censorship in the US?

The article at hand here talks about a new bill that would allow the government to crack down on the industry of illegal sharing of music and movies. It's called the Stop Online Piracy Act. And to me it sounds dangerous. Basically what the act will do is allow the government to force search engines to block websites it deems as infringing upon copyrighted material. The idea is that this will boost the economy because if all the illegal downloading is put to rest, people will be forced to purchase movies and music if they want to listen to or watch it. But I think that this is a widely open bill that could allow the government to censor the Internet. While I may or may not download illegal music, I don't really think it's right. I mean, when one does such a thing, in a way it's like stealing something. You are taking away someone's well earned money somewhere. But when movie tickets are generally close to $10, and the price of a popular song on iTunes has gone up to $1.29, it is easy to understand why someone might go for the illegal downloading path. It seriously adds up, especially with music. However, just because people are desperate, does not mean that the government should turn into a crazy overpowered machine. The article quoted Eric Schmidt of Google and he said the bill “would require ISPs to remove URLs from the Web, which is also known as censorship last time I checked." When did the US want to turn into China?

The author has a very general target audience, as anyone who is opposed to censorship would read this. The article also gave a lot of background info on the proposed law, as if to inform people who would not know about it. There was also quite the amount of logos in there. A decent amount of statistics was put into the article. The author also made a nice point by saying "In a tweet this week, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi wrote, “Need to find a better solution than #SOPA #DontBreakTheInternet.” Her nemesis, Darrell Issa, Republican from California and chair of the House Oversight Committee, retweeted Pelosi’s note, appending commentary of his own: “If even we can agree..."" Clearly if two very opposite people can agree that this bill is a bad idea, we can assume that it can only lead to bad things.

The Article: http://www.salon.com/2011/11/20/congress_seeks_to_tame_the_internet/singleton/?mobile.html