> Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Mozilla, Reddit, PayPal, Twitter, and scores of smaller tech companies went into battle mode to oppose SOPA and PIPA. This aut

> Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Mozilla, Reddit, PayPal, Twitter, and scores of smaller tech companies went into battle mode to oppose SOPA and PIPA. This author is getting some basic points wrong in this section that force me to reserve judgment on the entire article. (Unfortunate, since I think it's a great idea for journalists to do the hard work of checking up on orgs like EFF in a broad critique like this.) Aaron Swartz was the one who went into battle mode to oppose these bills, starting with COICA in September 2010. Aaron's own speech on the subject: "Now if you've been reading the press you probably didn't hear this part of the story. As Hollywood has been telling it, the 'Great Good Copyright Bill' they were pushing was stopped by the evil internet companies who make millions of dollars off of copyright infringement. But it just really wasn't true. I mean, I was in there-- in the meetings with the internet companies. (Actually probably all here today.) And if all their profits depended on copyright infringement they would have put a lot more money into changing copyright law. The fact is, the bigger internet companies-- they would do just fine if this bill passed. I mean, they wouldn't be thrilled about it, but I doubt they would even have a noticeable dip in their stock price. "So they were against it, but they were against it like the rest of us on grounds primarily of principle. And principle doesn't have a lot of money in the budget to spend on lobbyists. "So they were practical about it. Look, they said, this bill is going to pass. In fact, it's probably going to pass unanimously. As much as we try, this is not a train we're going to be able to stop. So we're not going to support it-- couldn't support it. But in opposition let's just try to make it better. "So that was the strategy. Lobby to make the bill better. They had lists of changes that would make the bill less obnoxious, or less expensive for them, or whatever. But the fact remained at the end of the day it was going to be the bill that was going to censor the internet. And there was nothing we could do to stop it. "So I did was you always do when you're a little guy facing a terrible future with long odds and little hope for success..." If you want to know the 10 things Aaron did next to prevent internet censorship[1], listen to the rest of the speech[2]. 1: Clickbait ftw. But if your going to get tricked into watching something it might as well be worthwhile every now and then. :) 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg