Hundreds of websites (TechCrunch included) have gone dark or visibly changed their appearance as a protest against the Stop Online Privacy Act and its Senate doppelganger, the PROTECT IP Act. It’s a powerful statement and many are saying that it is already producing effects: Senators are changing positions, awareness is rising, and the opposition is becoming a dinner-table topic.
But is this activism?
I’m not asking whether it’s a good thing (it certainly is) or whether it is effective in guiding policy (it certainly might be), but whether it is right to call it activism. → Read More
Regardless of where you stand on the SOPA battle, you’ve got to agree: seeing what seems to be the entire Internet come together to stand against something is incredible. Each company has a different approach, but their goal is the same: make sure everyone goes to sleep knowing what SOPA is.
While I don’t want to turn today’s protests into a who-did-it-best battle (that’s not at all the point), I’ve got to highlight Turntable.fm’s approach. It’s about as simple as could be, but it just oozes with symbolism. → Read More
Facebook may not be opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act as prominently as some other websites — it’s not blacking out the site today, or even posting an anti-SOPA/PIPA message on its homepage — but CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke out against the legislation in a post on his Facebook account. → Read More
This morning, online photo sharing site Flickr joined the growing number of web companies protesting the SOPA and PIPA legislation, which now include Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, and others. For a 24-hour period, starting today, Flickr is letting its members darken their own photos in an effort to raise awareness about the proposed, highly damaging legislation. But that’s not all – Flickr is going a step further, and will allow users to darken other members’ photos, too. Now that’s what censorship really feels like. → Read More
The online uproar against the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in Congress is already causing some in Washington to abandon the SOPA ship. A couple of co-sponsors of the bill are pulling their support. Representative Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) is no longer a co-sponsor, and Representative Lee Terry (R-Neb.) is also planning to remove his name from the co-sponsor list, according to Politico. One Congressman, Representative Justin Amash (R-Mich.) is even joining the protest movement. He changed his Facebook profile picture and added the added the note below to his Facebook page. → Read More
As you can tell from the homepage, it’s a sad, trying day for the internet. Many of our favorite sites like Reddit and Wikipedia have gone dark, leaving only an argument against SOPA on their homepages in lieu of cat gifs and knowledge. All in all, it will shape up to be an incredibly boring day in the name of justice. Because to be honest, SOPA is unconstitutional in the way it’ll be enforced, and means rarely if ever justify the ends.
→ Read More
Today people take to the streets and black out the web to protest unfair piracy legislation. To the tune of Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ they’ll be singing:
”Why, why are laws a thing you can buy? / They got paid off, should be laid off, re-election denied / Our web means more than lawyers, lobbies and lies / So speak up before the internet dies / Speak up before the internet dies”. Watch the video…
→ Read More
President and CEO of the Motion Pictures Association of America Chris Dodd has issued a strongly-worded statement regarding tomorrow’s planned outages and protests relating to the SOPA and PIPA legislation. If you didn’t already think the MPAA was a ship of fools, this will convince you once and for all. → Read More
Supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) may be on the run in the face of growing online protests, but SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA, is not dead yet. “The fight isn’t over,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian tells me in the TCTV video interview above. → Read More
Tomorrow, Google’s US homepage will include a link declaring its opposition to the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act. The news was reported on CNET and confirmed by Google in a statement emailed to TechCrunch. → Read More
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales wanted to send a “big message” to the U.S. government regarding the two heinous internet censorship bills currently being considered, and after a brief period of debate the world’s encyclopedia will soon do just that.
The Wikipedia founder announced on Twitter today that starting at midnight on Wednesday, January 18, the English language version of the world’s encyclopedia will go dark for 24 hours in protest of SOPA and PIPA. With their commitment confirmed, Wikipedia will be joining a slew of websites and companies that will suspend their operations for one day in an effort raise awareness around the two bills. → Read More
Support in Washington for the SOPA anti-piracy bill in Congress (and its Senate equivalent, PIPA), is waning. After weeks of mounting uproar online, Congressional leaders started backpedaling last week and the Obama Administration weighed in on Saturday in response to online petitions to stop the bills. The White House issued a clear rejection of some of the main principles of SOPA.
While the White House supports the major goal of the bills to stop international online piracy, the growing chorus of complaints about the ham-fisted way the law is going to be implemented may finally be acting a s a counterweight to all the media-company lobbying which is trying to push the bills through. In fact, the White house blog on the subject almost amounts to a pre-veto of the bills as they now stand (and which have yet to be voted on, much less approved, by either house of Congress). → Read More
During the Q&A of a press conference for the SFCiti initiative, investor Ron Conway told a pretty interesting story about a meeting he had yesterday with William Morris CEO Ari Emanuel and Marc Andreessen in Southern California.
“These bills are tantamount to censorship on the Internet,” Conway said, segueing into the anecdote where Andreessen apparently asked Emanuel whether the entertainment industry “wanted to turn the United States into China?” with the Stop Online Privacy Act.
→ Read More
There’s a war brewing against the Internet, and it’s not just SOPA (the bill in Congress that threatens to break the Internet in the name of fighting overseas content piracy). It is, in the words of Cory Doctorow, a “war on general-purpose computing.” (read his post, “Lockdown,” on BoingBoing if you haven’t already).
What he means is that in trying to clamp down on a very specific problem on the Internet (the wide availability of pirated movies, music, and other content on foreign servers beyond the reach of U.S. laws such as the DMCA), laws like SOPA start messing around with the inner workings of the Internet such as blocking DNS servers. Applying special-purpose rules to a general purpose technology messes it up for everyone. Doctorow explains the difference between general-purpose and special-purpose technologies with a parable of the wheel: → Read More
It’s 2012, and the uncorruptible and brilliant technical minds in Congress are back from vacation and once again working to pass two bills that would rewrite (and most likely ruin) how our internet works. So here’s another way to tell the world how you feel about the underhandedly titled Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate.
Go to a new site called BlackoutSOPA.org, and create a new profile photo for yourself, that you can easily install on Twitter or download to put on Facebook, Tumblr or any other site you want. Created by Hunter Walk and Gregor Hochmuth, the site offers three profile images to choose from: a simple pitch-black one, which is both easy to create on your own, and a little too subtle for the issue in my opinion; a slightly less conceptual one that just says “Stop SOPA” in place of your photo; or one that lets you easily layer the text “Stop SOPA” beneath your existing profile image. → Read More
While laughable in scope and reach (not to mention ridiculous in terms of potential enforcement) the Stop Online Piracy Act is seen as a very real threat to our freedom to, in short, surf the Internet. Although its ramifications are far more draconian than I’m letting on here, I posit that the government is the least of our concern when it comes to online freedom. Let’s catch up since our last few articles on the topic.
Since the GoDaddy kerfuffle, SOPA has gained traction as the hacker cause du jour. Designed to help copyright holders protect their property (something any casual observer can support), the bill, would allow the US government to essentially “turn off” part of the Internet that it doesn’t like. Most of these sites would be “rogue” or, more precisely, out of US jurisdiction. From the Bill: → Read More
Just in time for the aptly named “Dump Go Daddy” day, our favorite PR pinata GoDaddy just emailed a number of press, with a fresh statement from new CEO Warren Adelman.
From the email …
The statement is from our newly appointed CEO, who makes it clear, we don’t just ‘not support SOPA,’ Go Daddy OPPOSES SOPA.
When GoDaddy publicly recanted their support of SOPA last week, many were quick to point out that such an act didn’t really mean much. As far as the Judiciary Committee overseeing SOPA was concerned, GoDaddy was still a supporter.
That’s been changed, it seems. In the latest version of the US House Of Representatives’ SOPA Supporters list (heads up: it’s a PDF), GoDaddy’s name is nowhere to be found. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — took a WiFi stroll through the forest that is Hollywood’s attempt to lock down our TVs. It’s really too late, what with SOPA boycotts, reverse engineering of the Apple AirPlay bus, and Microsoft’s slow fade from CES underway. But that doesn’t stop the Cartel from trying.
It may turn out that you can someday move network news shows from Slingbox to the iPad and back up to Apple TV over WiFi, but for now the realtime bus is getting choked. In fact all things streaming is about to collide with bandwidth caps, at least in our house. With 5 Apple TVs and counting, it won’t be long before WiFi consulting becomes a trade school offering. Me, I’m off to Fry’s. Happy Holidays. → Read More
The Internet is up in arms about the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and for good reason. It could potentially block and censor sites for alleged copyright infringement without full due process. Companies that support the bill are facing boycotts (GoDaddy just withdrew its support for this reason).
But people on the two sides of the debate still don’t see eye to eye, which is why we invited one of the SOPA’s co-sponsors, Congressman Bill Owens (D-NY), to address the issues. We captured the conversation in the video above. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
