I recently gave a quick overview of SOPA and PIPA, the two bills in the House and Senate, respectively. The legislation can kill the internet as we know it by letting anyone bring down an entire website by claiming copyright infringement. Even worse, there is no due process. A website can be taken down with no recourse.

The consequences of SOPA/PIPA far outweigh any benefit. Actually, there is no benefit. The result will only be unintended consequences that will make the problems both bills seek to remedy even worse.

Here’s a rundown of the unintended consequences:

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Also See: 3 Unintended Consequences of SOPA/PIPA

The current SOPA/PIPA legislation slithering through Congress is probably one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation we’ve seen in recent history. Both bills threaten free speech in America and can ruin the internet as we know it.

SOPA/PIPA will also be job killers. A lot of the commerce, innovation and business revolves around the internet. If SOPA/PIPA is passed, it will become all but impossible for this growth to continue. In fact, many prominent venture capitalists have said they will stop investing in online start-ups if this legislation passes.

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We take the internet for granted today. It’s a part of our daily lives and a lot of people even making a living of the tubes. But it wasn’t always like this. For the younger generation, it might come as a surprise that the internet used to be a novelty.

I remember my dad telling me that only techies had  laptops and cell phones, and that email was pretty much something only businesses used.

How times have changed. Email is out. Social networking and Twitter is in. It seems that people socialize more online than they do in real life.

To show just how much of a novelty the internet was in the 90s, I came across some hilarious videos. The first is from the Today Show, where even the basic concept of the @ sign was a source of great confusion. The second video is from MTV.

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I’ve been one of the unlucky Amazon affiliates to be dropped from the program because the state of Illinois passed a law that would require Amazon to collect taxes on all sales in the state.

The law says that the online seller must have a physical presence in the state, and Illinois considers affiliates to be a “physical presence.”

Affiliates in other states, such as California, New York, Arkansas, North Caroline, Hawaii, Colorado and others, have been dropped. Some web companies rely on Amazon’s affiliate program for a large chunk of their revenue. I know of at least one company in Illinois that relocated to Wisconsin to keep their affiliate status.

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No matter what your politics are and regardless of what you think about Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, you have to admit one thing: He’s been a master at marketing his own online brand.

If you haven’t been to O’Reilly’s website, check it out. From offering a premium membership area, costing $49.95/year (very rare for a personal website to do this, and be successful at it), to behind the scenes clips, articles and selling the many books he’s written.

Billoreilly.com is all things Bill O’Reilly, building on the image he created through years of television shows, radio and other media. You don’t have to be a celebrity to follow his example though. It just takes a few loyal followers to successfully build your own brand.

Below are just a few examples of how he is cashing in on his name. While not every example below will work for you, it will give you some ideas about how to improve your website/blog to increase traffic.

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Google is creating huge demand for something that is already out there and readily available: A social network. Since unveiling Google+ last week with a limited number of invitations, demand for access to Google’s newest project has soared.

In fact, invites to Google’s social network are so limited and in such high demand, people are willing to pay for an invitation. Granted, the 99 cent asking price on Ebay is small change. But it still shows still shows how far people will go to be part of the next big thing.

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The largest online retail website Amazon.com dropped thousands of California affiliates on Wednesday. Amazon affiliates in California are the latest victim of an ongoing campaign by states to collect sales tax from online retailers.

The catch is, however, that the retailer must have a physical presence in the state to collect the sales tax. State laws have been written to include affiliates as being a “physical presence” in the state.

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We often hear about authors and publishers speaking out against piracy and how piracy will be the death of the publishing industry. But rarely do we hear about authors pirating their own work.

Is this some kind of publishing bizzaro world? I thought so when I first read this post from Goodreader. In part, it says:

We have found through our research that certain authors have been deliberately been leaking their own books to popular Bittorrent sites such as the Pirate Bay and Demonoid. From the authors we spoke with there were two main reasons why they initially did this. The first factor was to publicly denounce the torrent site for pirating their works and then capitalizing on the ensuing television, radio or online attention that came along with it. The second reason was far more nobler, to share their books for free on sites that often have copyright infringing material.

The first reason I don’t really understand. Uploading your own book to torrent sites and then denouncing them? Seems pretty counter intuitive to me. It’s like murdering someone to make a point that murder is bad.

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Amazon announced yesterday that subscribers to the Kindle edition of the New York Times will gain free access to the NYT website. The paper recently erected a paywall (which is ridiculously easy to bypass) that officially went live Monday March 28.

Here’s the press release from Amazon:

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Sometimes it’s easy to forget that even major news publications can make mistakes. Everything from spelling and punctuation errors to getting names wrong in a story. It happens.

But I usually don’t see many mistakes in news headlines – online or print.

Yesterday, I found a doozy.

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