Pop quiz!

How many of you who signed the anti-SOPA & PIPA petitions actually read the bills? Or did thorough research about the benefits and consequences of the two bills? One more question – how many of you actually did more than post a “Sign it, y’all [insert link to petition here]” on your Facebook or Twitter, and actually called your local representative to tell them you did not support the two bills?

Hmm?

As of Thursday, Google Inc. said that it collected more than 7 million signatures from the United States for its online petition to Congress to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

Internet companies even blacked out their websites and devoted their home pages to saying that the two bills would promote online censorship, disrupt user-generated sites, and kill innovation on the web. After millions of signatures though and the lobbying of so many Internet giants, nine co-sponsors began withdrawing their support for the Hollywood-backed bills to battle piracy.

Hooray! We saved Interwebz! w00t! …. Right?

Well, for now we have. But where would we be right now if huge companies such as Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Mashable, and Wordpress didn’t stand up and make the statement first? Very few of us would have even known what SOPA or PIPA even were, and what’s funny, is that those of us who live in the western part of Travis County (that’s you, UT students) are actually within the 21st Congressional District.
AKA Representative Lamar Smith’s district. AKA the guy who created the SOPA bill in the first place.

…Doh.

Yep. If you wanted to know the right person to complain to, you could easily shoot Lamar an e-mail, or call his Austin office. And, I’d hope that come November, when we are able to elect a new Congressman, people will actually take the time to inform themselves on his policies, and take the time to either vote for or against him. That might take too much effort, though.

We’re all guilty of it. We’re too lazy to read the news, we’re too lazy to keep ourselves informed about our government and its decisions, and we’re even lazy protestors when we finally do become even slightly cognizant of policy issues that could have a detrimental impact to our society. We have to have people baby us, and spoon feed us petitions on the Internet that only take five seconds of our time to sign. However, like it or not, we cannot constantly rely on those with power to take care of us.

SOPA has been around since October of 2011, and if any of you were already informed and protesting it before Google and Wikipedia took a stand, I applaud you. I also applaud those who, when the issue was brought to their attention, actually did their research and took a greater stand. We cannot remain apathetic in a rapidly changing world, and in a country that has been more than shaken by the economic downturn and by the digital revolution.

We must inform ourselves, because not all policies are going to be protested on the front page of major websites. There’s going to come a time where Americans will look back and regret the votes they did or did not cast, the protests they didn’t participate in, and the information that they chose to ignore. All I call for is more awareness. There’s more out there than SOPA that’s threatening our rights.