JoeSestak.com The Truth About SOPA — How the Corporate Lobby’s Argument Doesn’t Add Up A case for facts, statistics, and common sense. Let’s be #OPEN about it. Across the internet today, you’ll see some of your favorite websites “blacked out” in protest of something called SOPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act. However, don’t be fooled by its seemingly straightforward title: SOPA is one of the greatest challenges to a free and open web that we’ve ever faced. Ultimately, it’s a right step, but in the wrong direction. SOPA’s original intention was to protect intellectual property created by American artists, yet the result is something much different: an unfair restriction on many American websites, like YouTube and Reddit, that we’ve come to love. The media and entertainment industry are lobbying Congress hard to pass this bill, and this past Sunday on MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes, I had the great opportunity to have a discussion with one their biggest advocates, NBC Universal’s General Counsel, Richard Cotton. Mr. Cotton and the corporate supporters of SOPA are using two major points to convince Congress to vote in favor of SOPA: 1.SOPA saves jobs. 2.SOPA will not affect American websites. Mr. Cotton repeated these points again and again on the show, yet I rebutted with the facts: 1.The non-partisan Government Accounting Office, in a 32-page report, reveals that the claim that any number of jobs lost in industries such as entertainment/media due to online piracy “cannot be …
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