Come enjoy an up close and personal performance with Social Green and Shocks of Mighty at one of Carlsbad’s favorite pubs, the Flying Elephant.  Show starts early;  Social Green will be hitting the stage at 9pm sharp and playing for roughly an hour and some change.  Afterwards, Shocks of Mighty take the stage for the remainder of the night.  Both groups have a great live show, so this one is not to be missed.  We will have live video and audio recording, theLIEshow staff will be on deck!

The Views and Opinions expressed in the below article is one author’s personal take on what he sees and hears. Our website supports Freedom of Speech and allows authors to speak their mind. Guilty by Association aside, this is their take. Enjoy.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA, is a proposed bill by the House of Representatives. It would allow the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders against websites outside U.S. jurisdiction accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.

So what does that mean exactly?

When we take a look at SOPA, and what it’s intent is, we see this bill for how invasive and threatening it potentially is to our American way of life.  Essentially this gives the government the right to go on a witch-hunt by taking action first and asking questions later.

First off, take a website that operates within the U.S. and another that operates outside of the United States.  Now, the U.S. website is 100% legit and is not breaking any United States laws.  Yet on this site there is a comment section where someone has put a link to a site located outside of the U.S. which has illegal content. Let’s say you are the owner of this copy-written content and you observe that this foreign site may be “infringing” or has “infringed” on your copyright. The problem is, you can’t do anything about it because this website operates outside of the US.

Am I mistaken?

Is the idea of SOPA to give the U.S. Department of Justice the power to go after other websites that help facilitate or enable these “so-called” or “in-question” offending sites that “possibly” infringe on your copyright?

Let’s take a look at what that might mean exactly. Those that may benefit from these illegal sites operating outside of the U.S. might include search engines, ad networks, payment sites and DNS servers that host these sites. So when you put in www.yourmama.com and that site was purchased say at “GoMommy.com”, the host site is enabling or facilitating the “illegal” site and can be shut down entirely based on this bill.

At first we think this may be helpful until looking at how it will destroy jobs in the Internet community. Not to mention an invasion of our American privacy.  Sites like Face Book, You Tube, Vimeo, Flickr and much more stand to be shut down if this bill were to pass.  Any site that the U.S. Government feels the need for review can persuade a U.S. court judge to go after those websites “Dedicated to internet theft of U.S. property”, or those that enable or help facilitate it.  Any site in question can subsequently be shut down by the U.S. government.

So you may ask, “well if one site has nothing to do with it and in the end the government was wrong, can these businesses sue?”

The answer…No.

If a big site, like You Tube, were shut down for a day it would lose millions of viewers and money from ads. The threshold for suing back is quite funny. That’s when we see just how one sided this bill is.  One would have to prove that someone “knowingly materially misrepresented” themselves in order to be liable to any damages.

Have you ever used Wikipedia?  That could be shut down.

Do you use Google?  That could be shut down.

In fact, any new site that is purchased through a 3rd party server in question could get the entire hosting server shut down; affecting website owners and websites that have nothing to do with the offending activity.

In lamen terms, your own site or favorite site can be shut down for doing absolutely nothing wrong.

Are you going to sit back and watch?

TheLIEshow recovers lost files off a damaged hard drive, revealing some hidden jewels; thus creating the “Lost Tapes” series. Join us behind the scenes as the Social Green boys give you a rare acoustic version of their original tune “No Progression”. Enjoy this first volume of Lost Tapes and return to the channel for more gems!