Support SOPA and PIPA:

Freedom does not mean Freeness. The fact is, people should pay for others' work they consume, and SOPA and PIPA aim to make sure that happens. The problem is, many Internet users don't realize the trillions of pages of content they consume online every day wasn't free to make. Nor do they recognize how tech giants like Google and Facebook have made billions by directing them to this content, while often those who made the content weren't paid a dime.

Moreover, Web sites with a proxy IP address overseas can take and republish this content without content producers' being able to legally seek payment for the contents' use. This is theft, and anyone who supports it is essentially saying that it would also be OK for an old-fashioned publisher to profit from a book they did not pay the writer for the rights of. SOPA and PIPA crack down on this, and if you support SOPA and PIPA you are saying you do not agree with theft, or the slavery implicit in someone's profiting off someone else's labor without paying for that labor.

The reason all your favorite Web sites do not support SOPA and PIPA is they benefit from your using them to access work you and they do not pay for. And who wouldn't want to get things for "free"; only, how long do you think the quality of what you're accessing will remain high if no one is paid for creating it? Actors will not attend acting school, journalists will no longer attend journalism school, poets and novelists will stop learning to write poems and novels, directors will stop going to film school, etc. How, after all, could they pay for such schooling if what they learn to create is given away for free?

Wikipedia has complained that information will no longer be free if our senators and representatives support SOPA and PIPA, and that's true. But read the law for yourself and you will see that anyone will still be able to publish anything that is original. This petition is for those of us whole realize that information is not cheap to gather, nor is it cheap to present. And, therefore, without paying those who create new art, make new discoveries, and uncover corruption in corporations and our government, we as a culture will suffer a lack of new learning, a death to the creative impulse that has made our nation great, and most dangerously, the end to the Fourth Estate that ensures our republic.

Therefore, support SOPA and PIPA and ensure the following are no longer true on the Internet:
1.) Private companies determine accessibility based on undisclosed criteria (i.e. private censorship).
2. Private companies can charge for the service of exposure but profit, meanwhile, from content they neither created nor paid for.
3.) The general public refuses to pay for access to content they consume.
4.) Internet publishers are forced to rely on ad revenue solely, forcing them to publish content concerned with products and censored by outside companies, rather than content concerned with relevant issues.
5.) Turnaround and overhead for online distribution are minimal but, due to the demand for freeness, unprofitable commensurate with quality-production costs.
6.) Newspapers and mags of repute have been forced out of business.
7.) Hearsay, slander and defamatory fictions have replaced journalism.
8.) Marketing copy has replaced journalism.
9.) Writing another predictable vampire romance has replaced literature of substance, originality and thought.
10.) SEO has replaced diction, vocabulary and grammar.
11.) Plagiary has replaced original work.
12.) Starting capital and social connections, because they determine who can optimize for how long and how successfully, have replaced exposure due to merit.

The actual text of SOPA, not a second-hand appraisal from a legal expert hired by a tech interest:

http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/112%20HR%203261.pdf