by Will Conley
It's five minutes to midnight.
It is a fact that the SOPA and PIPA bills currently being debated in the United States Congress are harbingers of doom and destruction for the Internet as we know it. It has yet to be confirmed whether SOPA is indeed asking for the first-born child of all Web developers, or whether PIPA in fact calls for daily sacrifices of World of Warcraft addicts to the Mayan feathered serpent god Kukulkan.
What is clear is that SOPA and PIPA opens the door to legions of leathery-winged lawyers who are bloodthirsty to swarm the Internet with lawsuits for any and all sites that so much as link to a blacklisted website. Oh, the bills claim not to encourage blacklists, but that’s silly. You can’t keep track of which sites are bad, naughty sites that have allegedly pirated content, without maintaining lists.
So which websites will be put at risk of being shut down by SOPA and PIPA? We here at This Blog Rules have peered into the future using our magic decoder ring found at the bottom of a bottle of tequila, and this is what we came up with. The 13 most popular and important websites (by Alexa ranking and the author’s whim) that fall under the purview of SOPA/PIPA are as follows. [Read more…]