Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the JOBS Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at supporting small businesses by making it easier for them to access capital. A key feature of the bill enables crowdfunding, the process by which small companies raise growth capital from a large number of individual investors.
Did you try to look something up on Wikipedia only to see a black screen? You can thank SOPA for both of those blackouts.
SOPA, which stands for Stop Online Piracy Act, is an anti-piracy bill that is working its way through congress. It was introduced into the House of Representatives on October 26, 2011, and, if made into a law, would allow U.S. law enforcement, as well as intellectual property holders, to sue foreign websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Think about how the Chinese government can order blocks on websites…that could be the right of the U.S. government if SOPA passes.
The World Wide Web is going to feel a lot less wide on Wednesday. For a span of 12 hours, some of the Internet’s most popular sites – including Wikipedia, Reddit and the Internet Archive – will go dark, inaccessible to the tens of millions of users who visit every day.
The House Judiciary Committee debated the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act for hours Thursday — and about five hours into the 11-hour hearing voted 22-12 to reject an amendment that would do away with its most controversial provision that would force changes to core internet infrastructure in order to stop copyright infringement.
