If you haven't been keeping track of the news, there are a couple of pieces of legislation making their way through congress. One is SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and the other is PIPA (Protect IP Act). These pieces of legislation are being championed by big business interests in music, video, film, images and other media that holds copyrights to the intellectual property they produce. The purpose of these bills is to protect the copyrights by making every site on the internet responsible for what is posted to that site.
Can you image Facebook scanning everything you post to be sure you aren't posting something that might be copyrighted. MIGHT BE is the operative phrase here because checking for copyrights on every bit of data won't be possible and yet the sites could be shut down or fined if they failed to shut down users who post such content.
There seems to be agreement that these two bills, as they stand now, will not pass and will not be signed into law but that hasn't stopped many sites from jumping on the band wagon to be sure we all know just what is going to happen to the internet if moneyed interests prevail in making these sites responsible for what users post.
This goes well beyond sites that facilitate the illegal downloading of protected music, videos, books and films. It enters the realm of censorship and tries to make every internet server the police. The cost alone of implementing policing mechanisms would shut down most sites. The fear of prosecution, defense cost, jail time and fines would shut down most of the rest.
I, for one, cannot image a cyber world without Wikipedia.
Read more about it.