Harbour City SEO will be going offline on Wednesday, January 18th. Not for maintenance, but as part of one of the internet’s largest protests of all time.
The Stop Online Piracy Act has garnered massive attention over the last several months from privacy advocates, from free speech enthusiasts, from web giants and service providers, everybody is chiming in with their various cents’ worth. It’s gone so far as to launch an online rebuttal that’s going to go down in history (such as it is) as the day the Internet went black.
This isn’t a case of a few left-wing fringe elements going down, there are major players involved in the day long strike. Wikipedia, BoingBoing, WordPress, Reddit, Mozilla, ICanHasCheezburger and Failblog (etc., etc. and to name just a few) are going dark for the day to protest a bill that, while on its last legs, still has enough teeth to come back and bite us all in the pitoot.
So, it’s easy enough to not link to or host pirated content, but that’s not what has netizens in an uproar. It’s that the sweeping ambiguities of the bill imply that you could be penalized for who you link to, links to.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say I’m writing a piece (as I do) about file sharing, and let’s say I link to the infamous Pirate Bay as an example of how file sharing has been used to illegally share and distribute intellectual property.
According to SOPA, I could be tagged for violating the rights of any organization who’s intellectual property is being shared on the site I linked to. Under SOPA, my site would have to be pulled down, my ISP would be required to deny service and Google would be required to remove my site from the index.
There are other examples, less (that’s right, less) insidious in nature. The implications lead to a censored web, where content is controlled by the biggest holders of intellectual property (the film, television and music industry) and eliminates the “fair” internet.
While SOPA has essentially been shelved, the major opposition to the bill is still planning to speak out against it. This from the Sopa Strike website
On January 18th, 2012 the internet is going on strike to stop the web censorship bills in Congress! Now is our moment — we need you to do everything you can, whether you have a website or not.
If you, like me, want to support opposition to SOPA and PIPA, you can show your support by joining the Blackout SOPA movement. I’ve included a bunch of links below so you can get caught up on the issues.
WordPress plugin to participate in the SOPA Blackout
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on January 16, 2012 at 5:03 pm, filed under Privacy, Social Media. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.