SOPA. Those letters have been bouncing around the internet for a few months now, but what does it really mean to you as a net dweller now that the bill has passed the post in the USA.

Well for a start, it could possibly be the deaths knell of a free internet because the US tends to set international legislative trends.

The SOPA act is something that a great many Americans, as well as other members of the international community are alarmed about as it brings the US into an exclusive censorship club alongside three other great democratic nations, namely China, Iran and Syria.
‘Oh, wait!’ I hear you say, ‘those other nations aren’t in fact democratic in any way!’
Well, yes and therein lies the problem.

SOPA and its sister act PIPA will give legislators in the US vast powers to block and demand the removal of websites which contravene its precepts, and that path potentially leads to a terrible erosion of freedom of speech and a birth of internet censorship.
Even if you don’t live in the US the breadth and poor design of this act will influence how you work, play and socialise on the internet, and if other countries adopt similar measures then the last great free frontier will be gone.

‘Aren’t these acts designed to combat copyright infringement?’ Yes, but their blanket powers could easily be misused and the risk they pose through precedent is alarming.

Feed the Gamer is based in Europe, and whilst we agree that some form of legal protection for intellectual property needs to exist for the digital age, SOPA and PIPA are not the way forward.

As a result we will be showing our disproval for SOPA by suspending our usual services on the 18th January so get used to that blank screen people, because if this form of censorship spreads then you can expect to see it on many of the sites you currently visit.

If you’d like to do your bit to combat SOPA, you can find details of how to go about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Take_action