This is Dave Edstrom's personal blog called Photons and Electrons. This blog is about technology, as well as some of my personal interests. I am the CEO/CTO of Virtual Photons Electrons. I was the CTO for MEMEX for three years, the President and Chairman of the Board for the MTConnect Institute from May 2010 to January 2014 and prior to that I spent 23 years at Sun Microsystems.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
President Obama Is Right on SOPA & PIPA
The White House issued a statement this past weekend stating "we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet". President Obama is right and congress is wrong on this.
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) are examples of Congress and the Senate trying to do the right thing but not understanding either the law of unintended consequences or the fundamentals of technology.
SOPA and PIPA is analogous to is having a surgeon show up for brain surgery with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel. The bottom line is that one small infraction of copyright violation would be enough to block out the entire domain (all of the nodes at a given site).
Below is Google's and Wikipedia's homepage today. Go here to SPEAK up to your representative at Google's End Piracy, Not Liberty page.