Going on Strike
Many websites around the internet are going on strike tomorrow, and I am joining them. The reason for the strike is something that means very much to me personally, so please take the time to read this post.
There are a few proposals in congress now that would drastically change the way the internet works and change who is legally responsible for content online.
As someone who has a website that links to other websites and has user submitted content (thescruffypirate.org), this would directly effect my ability to continue to do so.
And again, as someone who makes a living through the internet, these proposals will make it a lot harder for my clients to continue to have the websites they do and thus make it harder to employ me to work on those websites.
To quote Boing Boing:
On January 18, Boing Boing will join Reddit and other sites around the Internet in "going dark" to oppose SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world. Boing Boing could never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we'd have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren't in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits.
If we failed to take this precaution, our finances could be frozen, our ad broker forced to pull ads from our site, and depending on which version of the bill goes to the vote, our domains confiscated, and, because our server is in Canada, our IP address would be added to a US-wide blacklist that every ISP in the country would be required to censor.
This is bad for the world! Please spend the two minutes it takes to email your congress-person about your opposition to these proposals.
18 January 2012 02:42am UTC • 54 views • 1 comment
Tagged with sopa, pipa, internet, censorship
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1 comment
Dread Pirate Benjamin
18 January 2012 05:28am UTC
Wikipedia is now officially on strike. Very disconcerting!