It's been a busy couple of days in the discussion of free speech in the United States, and if you're a regular reader of tech blogs, chances are you've begun to hear about one of this week's issues: the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. This bill, intended to help stem online piracy and backed by companies like Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner, has set off the alarms of many sites and companies on the internet because it essentially allows the government and private corporations to censor entire sites that they fear are illegally distributing copyrighted material.
Many companies — including Google, Twitter, Facebook, AOL, Zynga, Mozilla, LinkedIn, and Ebay, which took out a full-page ad in the NYTimes with a letter to the congressmembers involved — and numerous sites and civil-liberty groups —including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, Creative Commons, Wikimedia, and others — have spoken up against ...
