Websites like Google and Wikipedia going black in protest of SOPA

[calgarybean]

Google is just in the basic Google letters!!! whhha...wwwhhhaa....what!

[Hockey_Ninja]

I just realized that this was happening once i opened Wikipedia and it got blacked out

[burn_this_city]

Now what am I supposed to do all day at work?

[Notorious Honey Badger]

Originally Posted by saskflames96

I'm worried. Once they go black, they may never go back.

Once you go Ukraine, you will scream with sex pain

[LChoy]

Originally Posted by flameswin

What the hell is Sopa?

It's a proposed piece of legislation that may significantly harm the way we use the internet

The blackout is part of one of the most sprawling digital protests undertaken to date (for our live blog of the blackout and reaction, click here). Many of the world’s biggest tech companies have banded together with civil liberties activists, librarians and myriad other groups to protest two pieces of proposed U.S. legislation targeted directly at the way the Web works: The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act.

The laws, if passed, would give greater powers to the U.S. government to essentially blacklist foreign websites accused of hosting copyright-infringing content. Critics claim the laws are excessive in both remedy and scope, and would essentially make it impossible for sites such as YouTube and Flickr to exist in their current form.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle2306149/

[Resolute 14]

Our future leaders, ladies and gentlemen...

[Ironhorse]

Originally Posted by flameswin

What the hell is Sopa?

From one site:

The future viability of this website is under threat due to pending legislation in the US Congress brought forth due to pressure (and money) from the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry of America, among others. Should this legislation pass, running this site and other online communities that encourage freedom of speech and open sharing of ideas, photographs, and other media may no longer be possible.

You may have heard recent news that SOPA has been shelved, but this is misleading at best, and a deliberate attempt to quell attention to the issue at worst. Under SOPA/PIPA, all websites (including those abroad) would be required to actively police their users' activity and prevent them from posting copyrighted material. If copyrighted material manages to make it onto a website, the US Department of Justice can issue an order to shut the website down by not allowing any one to access it through its domain name, without warning, due process, or judicial oversight. For our website, and many other online communities such as Reddit, YouTube, and Wikipedia, this is untenable. Under the current Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Safe Harbor provisions, we have a system that works incredibly well at stopping copyright infringement. If SOPA passes, filtering our users' content before it can reach the public is simply not feasible, and we will likely be forced to shut down for good.

[Locke]

Originally Posted by Zevo

Whitepeopleproblems

No way, SOPA is going to be a problem for all of us.

[troutman]

How dare anyone interfere with the widespread theft of copyright material?

[burn_this_city]

Originally Posted by troutman

How dare anyone interfere with the widespread theft of copyright material?

How about your avatar, that's copyright material. Should the US government be allowed to shut down this website because people like yourself have copyright material shown?

[troutman]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

How about your avatar, that's copyright material. Should the US government be allowed to shut down this website because people like yourself have copyright material shown?

Fair Use.

[valo403]

Originally Posted by troutman

How dare anyone interfere with the widespread theft of copyright material?

I think you're well aware that this issue is far more complicated than you're attempting to paint it, and that SOPA goes far beyond targeting 'theft' of copyright material.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by troutman

How dare anyone interfere with the widespread theft of copyright material?

burn_this_city already mentioned my biggest problem with SOPA. The fact that if any user, not just the site owner or administrators, links to content that contains copyright material then the website can be 'taken down'. It's main method of doing this, as I understand it, will be to establish a system very similar to (in results) the "Great Firewall of China".

Normally, I am all for cracking down on the distribution of copyright materials, but this legislation gives far too much power to far to little people. Its like swatting a fly that has landed on your face with a sledge hammer.

[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by troutman

How dare anyone interfere with the widespread theft of copyright material?

troutman, I'm not sure if you're being serious or just playfully trolling here, but I generally respect your posts, so I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

SOPA/PIPA goes way beyond what is necessary to fight copyright infringement. It gives the US government the power, at the behest of the entertainment industry, to shut down entire websites that aren't even hosted in the US and may not be in violation of US law because they contain or even link to copyrighted material.

I assume you have, at some point, found value in sites like wikipedia or YouTube or even Google. Those services never would have got off the ground if SOPA had been in effect when they first started. There's a reason tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere around the world, people who are responsible for creating millions of good jobs, are absolutely aghast at this proposed legislation. It's not about shutting down college kids sharing mp3s over Napster -- it's MUCH bigger than that.

[kirant]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

How about your avatar, that's copyright material. Should the US government be allowed to shut down this website because people like yourself have copyright material shown?

This bill fails to work that way. It states that primarily distributors (sites which have the primary purpose of distributing illegally used wares) will be targetted. Torrent sites for example (and before it is asked, YouTube is not viewed or used as a primary distributor)

It basically reads that:
- The US Department of Justice, on recommendation from a company, may pursue charges against a foreign site for primary distribution. To do so, they must get a court order (which is pretty key. I think this part is skipped over by a lot of sources).
- If provided, the court has the power to ask that DNS service be denied (to be removed by Lamar Smith, the bill writer), freeze assets, remove them from search engines, and ask ad sites to have them stop appearing, based on what it thinks is required.
- This can be fought by appearing in the court and if the company is found to be attempting to abuse the law, they are liable for damages to the site holder.

Unintentional or minor distribution of links to illegal distributions sites (such as posting links on CP or Facebook) are not the scope of this law. Again, sites that distribute torrents, primarily distribute illegal data (such as a site that is primarily designed to host free movies via streaming), or sites with the primary purpose of finding these links (such as a search engine or database which takes a Google-esc approach to finding torrents or illegally streaming movies) are what is being looked at here.

...Also, I've never heard of a case yet of pursuing online photo piracy.

[Burninator]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

SOPA/PIPA goes way beyond what is necessary to fight copyright infringement. It gives the US government the power, at the behest of the entertainment industry, to shut down entire websites that aren't even hosted in the US and may not be in violation of US law because they contain or even link to copyrighted material.

Shut down the website in the US or shut it down for the whole internet? Will this effect Canadian internets?

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by Burninator

Shut down the website in the US or shut it down for the whole internet? Will this effect Canadian internets?

They won't have the power to shut down the actual website, but they can block it by removing it from DNS and search engines. Essentially it will still exist, but a large portion of the population will have no way to get there.

It will certainly have an impact on Canadian internet because so much is tied together, but it won't be quite as bad here I would think.

[rubecube]

Originally Posted by troutman

How dare anyone interfere with the widespread theft of copyright material?

I don't know how anyone can say that the increase in digital downloading has been a bad thing for the music industry, especially the average fan and the indie scene. We have way more festivals than we've ever had, and they're attracting bigger names than they ever could have before. Smaller bands are getting more exposure, and likely making more money, than they ever would have before the advancement of digital downloading. We as fans have more selection and variety than we ever could have dreamed of.

As noted by Chuck Klosterman, musicians also have way more artistic freedom than would have been provided to them without the advent of piracy.

If your argument is that the ends don't justify the means, well you may have a point, but that would also have to be partially based on the assumption that every illegally downloaded song would've been purchased legally in a world without piracy. From my own anecdotal experience, this simply isn't true.

The fact of the matter is that record companies spent 40 years lining their pockets by bending over the consumer and force-feeding various musical trends upon the masses. It's not like we don't know the formula either, which just got easier and easier to duplicate as time went on. Churning out pop stars and forcing radio play became a pretty easy and effective way to make money. Throw in the fact that the companies were charging $15/CD and leaving very few options to buy individual songs and people started getting fed up.

Maybe I'm just a dirty pinko, but I don't think art should be solely accessible by the wealthy. We have a dearth of culture in society as it is.

And I wouldn't weep too much for the recording industry. They're still making billions of dollars/year, more than enough to file completely ludicrous and frivolous lawsuits.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by kirant

This bill fails to work that way. It states that primarily distributors (sites which have the primary purpose of distributing illegally used wares) will be targetted. Torrent sites for example (and before it is asked, YouTube is not viewed or used as a primary distributor)

It basically reads that:
...

I hope you are right, this is one of the rare cases where I have no read the actual text of the bill to form my own opinion.

[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by Burninator

Shut down the website in the US or shut it down for the whole internet? Will this effect Canadian internets?

Yes, it has the potential to affect the internet in Canada and elsewhere. The server itself will still be running somewhere in the world, but the US government can poison its DNS entry and force search engines to remove it from their results.

If you knew the IP address of the server you could still access it, but if you typed the URL into your browser or tried searching for it on Google (and those two methods are how 99.999999% of the world uses the web), you could not access the site.

[Edit]
Beaten by Rathji