Guest Post: SOPA by Julia De Mars

Last week, I was relaxing in bed reading a book when my daughter, Julia, came storming into the room. She demanded,

“Mom! Have you heard of SOPA?”

I informed her that yes, in fact, I had. She said she had read about it on Google and written a letter to her Congressman. Students in her eighth-grade class are required to select an article each week and write a summary on a current event. They take turns presenting their article and this week was Julia’s turn. I liked her presentation so much, I asked her to use it as a guest blog. This is only the second guest post I have ever had.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What?
SOPA= Stop Online Piracy Act
This bill means that if any copyrighted material is uploaded on the internet, the website it’s on could be taken down and the person who uploaded it could go to jail.

My current event is about SOPA , the response from the American public and the Chinese reaction to that response.

The article I used as reference is “The Chinese view of SOPA” from The New Yorker.

The author wrote, “Chinese’s reactions to American protests … ranged from sympathy to gentle Schadenfreude.” Some Chinese Web users are saying the American government is trying to copy them or think that they are ahead of the world, and we are racing to catch up.

Why?
● A lot of music industries and other entertainment thought they could make a lot more money if they could get SOPA passed.
● Websites are protesting because they don’t want their web sites taken down.
● The Chinese reacted the way they did because they have censorship there and we’ve always claimed to be so much better than them as far as not having censorship and now we’re starting down the same path.

How?
● The protests started with a few programmers creating a code to blackout their websites and passing it on to other web sites.

FUN FACT!!!(:
● Guess who else is opposed to SOPA?…
Justin Bieber!
Because if SOPA were passed when he was younger making youtube videos of himself singing Chris Brown songs they would be taken down and he would have been thrown in jail and never become famous.:(…(THANKYOU)

So, yeah – STOP SOPA !

Here is a PDF file of the presentation: SOPA

(My dad made the pdf file before I had a chance to fix a couple of things like misspelled words but they WERE fixed for the presentation for my class, just so you know.)