This is the second half of today's journal, the first half is available at Journal 2nd Part. A readable version of this journal is available here: Pastebin version.

First off, this journal is thanks to DA's free premium membership day. Everybody have fun playing with the premium membership features? Good.

Because if the SOPA or PIPA acts pass in Congress, there won't be a DeviantArt to have premium memberships on.  SOPA could block every single website that has the ability to host copyrighted material, and guess what? DA has that ability. It could forever change the Internet as we know it. On Wednesday, January 18th half the Internet blacked out their sites, with notable inclusions being Wikipedia and Google. My favorite Twitter wave was #factswithoutwikipedia, I must admit, but watching the entire Internet rage against SOPA as one was amazing to me. It was like watching history in the making. We submitted so many complaint forms that we melted several Congressional servers. 18 senators changed their stance to oppose SOPA, many of whom were co-sponsors, and more have likely changed since. Google got over 100 million people to sign their petition to oppose SOPA. The sheer magnitude of what we did boggles me, but it isn't over yet, as Wikipedia's banner warns.

They say we are fearmongering when we say it will break the Internet. They say the Internet will work just fine, that the technical implementation of these bills won't interrupt our web access, but it will. By break the Internet, we don't mean physically. We mean it will break the culture of the Internet. If we don't have freedom of speech, if we are afraid of being sentenced to jail for posting copyrighted leaks, if we can't create new websites and post new content, if we live constantly in fear of any 'do-gooder' taking down what we post, the culture and the spirit of the Internet will be, effectively broken. The Internet is, at it's core, uncontrollable, and that's the pure beauty of it. They are trying to control what cannot be controlled.

As an independent writer, you might think that I would support those who want to "protect" my by copyrighting my works with DRM and defend my intellectual property. And yes, I know how it feels to be plagiarized, and I don't like it when people take my ideas and parade them as their own, not even giving me credit. But as an up-and-coming writer, my biggest fear isn't piracy. My biggest fear is the fact that nobody knows my name. If people are stealing my works and spreading them around the Internet - well, that's one step up than what I have now, with nobody knowing me, nobody caring enough to "pirate" my works.

There are many more issues on this subject, none of which I can cover appropriately in this journal entry, but if you live in America and you haven't taken action on this issue yet, I encourage you to call your congressmen and let them know you want them to oppose SOPA. More information can be found at Wikipedia's SOPA Initiative Page. If you don't live in America, do what you can to alert your leaders to this spreading problem, and tell anyone you know in America about it. If we don't act, we will lose our rights.

And because these images look really cool when blacked out, I'll leave a few of my favorites, but not with the explanations.



See more features here: [link]