SOPA, PIPA and the end of Digital Freedom

US Capitol. Don't worry, I took this photo. It's not copyright infringement.

This has nothing to do with photography. Well, maybe it does. After all, I am in an industry that is certainly subject to copyright infringement.

That said, I'm growing increasingly concerned over the state of our country, the power of our government, and the things it believes it's capable of controlling.

Most are familiar with SOPA and PIPA by now, thanks to large sites like Google protesting the proposed legislation, and sites like Wikipedia voluntarily going offline for 24 hours to make their point. But today the Federal government has stepped in and shut down Megaupload, one of the world's leading file sharing sites.

This is a big deal because it starts to pave way for our government to not only get you into trouble if you share copyrighted material, but for even having copyrighted material... even if you're unaware that it's sitting on your servers.

It also potentially paves way for government to monitor and view all your private data in order to make sure you don't have any copyrighted material.

I might be naive, but I'd like to think that my grandfather didn't fight in WWII to protect a country that would just turn around and screw its citizens.

This is getting out of hand fast, and rather than go into too much detail here, please read the article I just wrote for theFIVE10.com.

theFIVE10.com : MEGAUPLOAD FILE SHARING SITE SHUT DOWN BY FEDS

what do you think of the whole thing?

-Clay