The Bill of Rights was created to guarantee personal freedom and to limit the power of the government. It was formed to protect natural rights of liberty and independence. Without the Bill of Rights, it’s likely that the Constitution would have never been adapted, and without it, who knows where the United States would be today.

Freedom was addressed in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, because the United States is a nation built of independence for the notion of free will. The Founding Fathers chose to address freedom first, because without it, the United States wouldn’t exist.
America is a government by the people for the people; it does not limit the rights or ideas of its citizens. Because of the words written over 200 years ago, Congress is not allowed to make any laws “abridging the freedom of speech.” However, it seems like our rights of words are being restricted as the SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act) bill comes closer to having the potential of being a law.

SOPA is a bill brought to the Legislative on October 26th, 2011, to fight against online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. Legislation would have the ability to remove an entire domain for a single thing posted on a blog, and sites such as Youtube could be taken down due to copyrighted material being used in videos. Much like communist China, internet-users would require ISP to block access on sites. This majorly violates the First Amendment and is Internet Censorship. In reality, SOPA would do very little to actually stop pirating sites, and instead prevent free speech actions.

Instead of dealing with the bigger issues in the United States, such as trying to fix unemployment, deal with the drop of the stock markets, or legalize same sex marriage, the government decides to attempt pirating, which does little harm to the music industry. File sharing is no different than borrowing a CD from a friend and burning the songs onto your iPod, but the government seems to see this as a larger problem. Obviously people will be able to sleep safer at night knowing that serials killers still run free, but teenagers are unable to download a song off the internet.
Media and government must remain separate in a democracy, or it ceases being a democracy. Instead it mimics a tyranny, which our ancestors fought so hard to escape from. Allowing the government to interfere with media, would stop the free flow of independent thoughts and beliefs, thus destroying the original foundation the United States was built upon.
The United States is a nation of ideas and if the government silences the freedom of speech, the growth of ideas and creativity will stop, and we will no longer be a land of free will and dreams, bus instead America will be stunted in expansion, and cease to be the idea that the Founding Fathers created.