Currently our wonderful representatives in Government are quickly pushing through a bill called the "Stop Online Piracy Act". This has received little or no attention in any of the mainstream news outlets.
This bill, basically written by the Motion Picture Association of America, threatens to shut down any site with potentially copyrighted material. This threatens any community-sourced website, including Porfessor Paddle.
It seems apparent that this type of legislation threatens what makes the internet "fun". I encourage everyone to contact their representative and tell them to block passage of this new bill.
Contact you state rep:
Click to Contact Your State Rep

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_ActStop Online Piracy Act

Pretty much. Thanks for the headzup, Ben. I'm gonna look into it tonight.

Just got an email that the house version of the bill is not going to a vote as expected:

"The House Judiciary Committee considering whether to send the Stop Online Piracy Act to the House floor abruptly adjourned Friday with no new vote date set – a surprise given that the bill looked certain to pass out of committee today."

"Over the last 36 hours, over 97,000 people signed our joint petition with reddit against this bill, and thousands more called their representatives. The Internet fought back to protect the Internet -- and we won, for now."

It looks like a case where activism by the masses is playing a role in preventing our corporate gov't from sneaking through a bill that would be bad for the people. I think this is going to be increasingly important as the flow of corporate money to our leaders keeps increasing.

An update.... After an enormous response by just about every web based community on the internet, Obama has changed sides on this support of SOPA, well at least publicly.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngaudiosi/2012/01/16/obama-says-so-long-sopa-killing-controversial-internet-piracy-legislation/

Don't be confused here, there is still PIPA and Obama's track record shows that his motions are basically executed per popular opinion, which is nothing new for anyone in the office. Our leadership starting with the President and moving down simply moves publicly to support majority movements, privately executing motions to support the interests that pay the bills. It doesn't start with Obama either this is a long running epidemic.

Why the whole rant, just because the president is siding with this new "Popular Slogan" "STOP SOPA", it does not mean that we should stop being involved. We need to stay active with PIPA and future legislation targeting the same goal.

SOPA is still not dead, PIPA is on the table and there are serious businesses devoted to making sure legislation is passed.

Get Involved, That is all.

uh, dave, the whole reason we have elected officials is so we don't have to think.