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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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 … → 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… → 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. → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
Surprise! GoDaddy has just recanted their support of SOPA, issuing a press release and blasting out a massive mountain of tweets on the matter. This comes just hours after they were seemingly cementing their position, shrugging off the boycotts as something that had yet to cause “any impact to [their] business”. → Read More
Since the list of 120 or so SOPA supporting companies hit the Internet yesterday, the lines have been drawn; People are publicly promising to pull thousands of domains from domain registrar Godaddy after it appeared on the list as a supporter. Other people are calling those people “bullies.”
Whether you’re for or against SOPA has become somewhat of a pain point amongst techies, with the… → Read More
And the anti-SOPA rallying of the tech world’s best continues.
Just minutes after Ycombinator’s Paul Graham disclosed that SOPA-friendly companies would be blacklisted from the YC Demo Day, Cheezburger (as in I Can Has Cheeseburger, FAIL Blog, Know Your Meme, etc.) CEO Ben Huh has announced that they will be moving their array of over 1,000 domains away from GoDaddy unless the registrar… → Read More
At this point quite a few internet companies have protested H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in creative ways. Held by many to be the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet if it passes, SOPA would makes it really easy for copyright holders to force sites offline that they think are offending, among other things.\
While the judiciary vote has been delayed until next year, the… → Read More
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is delayed in Congress, but it is definitely not dead. The media company lobbyists and their Congressmen (hello, Lamar Smith!) are simply regrouping. Some of the more controversial aspects of the bill include transferring liability for copyright infringement to sites that host user-generated content and blocking that content via DNS servers.
To highlight the… → Read More
The Stanford Law Review has posted a concise and informed takedown of SOPA and PROTECT-IP, the bills currently creeping their way towards votes in their respective legislative bodies. They make many of the same objections I brought up in my article Kill Switch, but with fewer words and more authority.
The piece was authored by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post — from… → Read More
The extremely unpopular SOPA bill was supposed to be the last order of business today as the House Judiciary Committee prepared to break for the holidays, but a parade of objections and amendments (over 50) kept the bill in discussion and at last the committee adjourned without resolving the issues.
What was expected in this contingency was for the committee to resume work whenever the House… → Read More
The Congressional Judiciary committee is debating a bill today called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which nobody in the Internet industry wants to see passed. Not surprisingly, the bill was written by lobbyists for the music and movie industries, who are frustrated by their inability to go after foreign sites filled with pirated material. The piracy problem is real, but the proposed solutions… → Read More
The much-maligned SOPA bill is facing a lot of heat as much of the tech industry sets its weight against it. But while the legislation is being discussed, its extreme solutions to criminal online sites are already being adopted. A judge in Nevada has ordered that 228 websites be seized, their domain names transferred, and their listings removed from search engines.
There are several serious… → Read More
Congress is in the process of kneecapping the web as we know it with a House bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act (a similar bill, called the Protect IP Act, is in the Senate). In a misguided attempt to curb piracy on the web, the bills would introduce website blocking at the DNS level, among other things, in a way that would effectively amount to censorship. And they could… → Read More
We’ve already articulated our stance on the PROTECT IP, SOPA, E-PARASITE, or whatever you want to call it bill, which creates a dangerous precedent of blacklisting domains and concentrates power on rights-holders, and remains vague enough to be easily abused. Eric Schmidt has already spoken out against it, saying that Google would not comply with its restrictions. Today he upped the rhetoric a… → Read More
The so-called PROTECT IP act is under fire again as it enters the process of becoming law. We’ve talked about it on this blog before and no doubt the discussion will continue after it passes or is rejected, but it’s important at this critical moment that everyone concerned weigh in and make an unambiguous statement regarding the quality of this bill. So then: PROTECT IP is a lunatic proposal… → Read More
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