Heard of SOPA? It’s the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Basically it’s punitive legislation that would effectively end the Internet as we know it. It would allow copyright holders to go after website owners for any infraction.

It might sound like a good idea, but what about this scenario? Let’s say I run a large website with billions of users, something like YouTube. I can’t possibly police a billion people. Now let’s say that one of my users uploads a webcam video diary with Miley Cyrus’ Party In the USA playing in the background. Miley Cyrus can now sue *ME* for copyright infringement. I’ve got nothing to do with this, I just run a website. Ms Cyrus should be going after the user who uploaded the video.

That’s SOPA. It’s a poorly written law being debated in Congress right now. If this thing passes, the Internet shuts down.

One of the many companies that supports SOPA is the web hosting and domain name registrar GoDaddy! There are many reasons to hate GoDaddy! So not only does GD support SOPA, they also helped write it. This was enough for me to cancel my GD services and find a new web host.

There was a bit of downtime yesterday as I moved things over to HostGator but everything seems to be running smoothly now.

If you use GoDaddy! for anything, please consider moving to a new registrar or web hosting company.

Now that I’ve gotten that done I can start writing my Congressman (Jerry McNerney, Democrat, California’s 11th district) to let him know how I feel about SOPA.

Who’s your congressman?