Sopa and Pipa – What you need to know
Sopa and Pipa
If you are unsure what this is all about and think it’s just something “that those guys on the hill need to worry about” watch the video below. Once you have a better understanding please take 2 mins out of your day and contact your congressman now or use these guys otherwise many sites you know and love could disappear.
httpv://youtu.be/yDX8Lyl16Qs
I can’t say it better than in the words of Mr Mullenweg the founding developer of WordPress, taken from the BBC or should I say “pirated” from them…..
“I’ve built my life on a free and open internet. As the co-founder of WordPress.org, a free software project that aims to democratise publishing, and the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com that hosts blogs from around the world in pursuit of the same goal, the proposed US legislation to regulate and censor the free and open foundation of the internet makes my mouth go dry with fear.
The rise of the web over the past two decades and the freedom to publish and express yourself online will be looked back upon as a cultural revolution.
We have gone from a world split between gatekeepers and media “consumers” to a world in which anyone regardless of geography, finances, social class, race, gender, or any other demographic identifier is free to engage with the rest of the world on their own terms.
That freedom is of paramount importance and must be protected.
That’s why we’re blacking out our websites on the 18th to raise awareness of this issue, and giving our users tools to do the same.
The tech world is fiercely competitive and companies seldom agree on anything, when you see so many united in solidarity on a single issue, you know there’s something to it.
What concerns me the most about Sopa and the Protect IP Act is not that media companies and legislators want to have measures in place to protect copyright – for example we reply to and comply with DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notices on WordPress.com when we receive them, it works well for everybody – it’s that the authors of the legislation don’t seem to really understand how the internet works.
The definition of domestic versus foreign sites shows a woeful lack of comprehension about how domains are used and how traffic flows on the internet.
Where do I stand? On the side of publishing freedom.
What do I hope for? That these pieces of legislation be set aside, and that any future legislation in this arena be drafted by people who understand how the internet works – and how it won’t if they do the wrong thing.”
So make your own decisions, should people that openly state they don’t understand or use the internet (openly stated in video streams available …. yep you guessed it – online) be allowed to put forward legislation of this magnitude? It’s a game changer.
Don’t leave it to others, get involved, get online, stay online.
Thanks for supporting this blog.
Sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16604990
http://americancensorship.org/
http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa
So, sites like Youtube shoud be shut down, indefinitely, while they sort out all the different claims and their legitimacy? It would take a decade to sort through it all. Meanwhile, no more Youtube.
I have no problem with protecting your IP but the great majority of the content on some of these sites actually belongs to the people who posted it. A lot of people make a living with videos on Youtube. Should their source of income and our source of entertainment stop because someone else happened to use the same site to upload The Karate Kid?
The real b1tch is, these people wouldn’t even be able to sue for compensation. Not even if every ip claim turned out to be false. After all, they were following the letter of the law.
The proposed law is such bullshit because it allows mass abuses of free speech without due process.
Suppose I write a website that is highly critical of someone, a business, a government institution, a celebrity- whoever wants to silence me can accuse me of infringing anything, a picture, a bit of prose, anything. Do I wind up in court before my website gets shut down? No, I get presumed to be guilty my website is down. The youtubes, diggs, facebooks, and reddits of the world are forced to get tied up with legal proceedings in a specially created bureaucratic process that favors anonymous accusers and presumed “Intellectual Property Owners”. This is just an extension current government processes already established in the DMCA (for information on how the DMCA is used in this fashion see http://chillingeffects.org/