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During a speech last night former Vice President, and head of Current TV, Al Gore came out against SOPA by warning is a threat to the vibrancy and freedom of the Internet.

Here is the video:

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Gore said,

There is a growing concern on the part of the companies and individuals that create that content that they are not getting compensated in a fair way, and so they want to impose a new set of requirements on those companies that provide access to the Internet. You know, like the browsers, search engines, etc., and some of these new requirements according to the experts on the Internet would very probably have the effect of shutting down the very vibrancy of the Internet. As in all things some compromise must be possible, the content creators and owners have a point and a legitimate complaint. But in our country, in our world today, there is hardly anything more important, whether you want to solve global warming, as I do. Whether you want to reinvigorate democracy as many of us do. Whatever problem you want to fix, there is hardly anything more important to getting the right things done than to save and protect the vibrancy and freedom of the Internet. The Internet is bringing life back to democracy. We saw it in Egypt…We’re seeing it in Russia now. We’re seeing it in so many places, and maybe some of those aren’t the best examples, but you look at the reform movements around the world and in the U.S. more than likely they’re based on Internet forms of organization, and anything that would serve to threaten the vibrancy and freedom of the Internet in the future, I’m against.

SOPA is a threat to the use of the Internet as communication tool. By giving the entertainment industry the power to censor the Net, SOPA would have the potential to destroy, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and any other social media site where information and or links are shared.

The cost of SOPA would be the freedom of the Internet.

Without the above mentioned social media websites, there would have been no Arab Spring, there would be no Occupy Wall Street. I suspect that if SOPA would have been in place in 2008 there would be no President Barack Obama. The Internet is the incubator of change movements in our modern society.

The Internet has replaced the traditional mainstream media, and SOPA is their play to get their power back. A look at the list of SOPA supporters reads like a who’s who of corporate media giants. CBS, Newscorp, Time/Warner, Disney, Comcast/NBC Universal, these same five big companies just so happen to control the mainstream media in the United States.

Protecting copyright holders is a pretext. Their real mission is to suck the freedom and equality out of the Internet. SOPA is not a left versus right issue. Al Gore was correct. SOPA will not only make the Internet, but also the world a very different and less free place.