The Internet flexed its big, manly muscles at Congress yesterday as many popular sites blacked out in the middle of the week, which happens to the best of us. Their “protests” were meant to warn and inform citizens of the dangers of SOPA and PIPA, two bills currently being discussed that are meant to protect copyright.
No group stands to be more aversely affected than essay plagiarists.
These artists, who made it to college through thoughtful and focused copying and pasting of other people’s exact words, fear that their craft may be decimated by the legislation.
“What we do is essentially graffiti,” an anonymous sophomore said. “It’s illegal, but at least until now, it was hard for the government to regulate.”
The students fear that SOPA will censor their essays before they can hand them in to their professors. According to a source that Campus Basement sincerely promises is trustworthy, the highest grade any student has ever gotten on a paper that was mostly black bars was a C+.
“I’m really scared,” Lacy Fair, a junior, said. “All my life I’ve gotten A’s on most assignments, and I’ve only had to sleep with one of my professors to pull that off. I’m taking 18 credit hours, I don’t have time to sleep with all of those TA’s.”
Though it appears most cheaters and procrastinators, otherwise known as the entire student body of the University of Missouri, oppose both bills, the University issued a press release this morning coming out in support of Congress. “What now, bitches? You actually have to do your work. Suck on that one. Us: One, Y’all: None,” the press release said.
Not everyone negatively affected by the legislation is a lifelong cheater. Some of them, like freshman Harris N. Ford, started cheating after they began attending the university.
“Even my freshman year, I had to submit stuff to Essay Grader so they could check and stuff. Ever since I got out of the iRobot styled hell, though, I’ve pretty much just been copying and pasting Wikipedia articles,” Ford said.
While most of their concerns are selfish and, therefore, righteous, some students fear SOPA’s wider wingspan, outside of censoring copied essays and the sources of information they copy from.
“Perez Hilton’s website has to have copyrighted material on it, it has to,” a girl who’s name nobody cared to remember said. “I can’t not read Perez. If they censor Perez, I’m voting Republican. This is all Obama’s fault.”
