Protesting SOPA and PIPA

Today's the day that many major sites on the internet go dark in protest of two pending bills in Congress: The House's "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) and the Senate's "Protect Intellectual Property Act" (PIPA).  This article in the Washington Post briefly lays out the dispute.  According to the Post, this struggle pits Hollywood and the recording industry, both of which seek to curb online piracy of copyrighted works, against the largest technology companies such as Wikipedia, Google and Twitter which assert the proposed bills will stifle innovation on the internet. 

We don't plan to have www.lowelldeeds.com or www.masslandrecords.com go black today, at least not in protest, but these bills do bear close watching.  The internet has become a vital part of so much of our lives these days, that it would be a shame to regress just to protect the financial interests of those who failed to keep up with rapidly changing technology.