• For most it will mean blacking out their site entirely from 8am – 8pm EST because that’s what could happen if these bills are passed.
• For others like Google, they will be making a statement on their website with links to information but without completely blacking out their site.

WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

If you’re thinking “but didn’t they say SOPA was shelved?” PIPA is still set to hit the floor next week and SOPA could be revived. There are more people in congress who want the bills to pass than the number opposed to them. Congress stats: http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/
More details on why this still needs our attention: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech

WHAT CAN YOU DO? (useful SOPA/PIPA protest sites):
http://sopastrike.com/
http://americancensorship.org/
http://www.blackoutsopa.org/

Talk about it, draw attention to it, sign petitions, and contact your congress person if they still support the bills! (Plenty of links off of the above sites.)

#SOPASTRIKE

No copyright on this post – please feel free to copy and paste and use this content as you like.

Here’s what I wrote to my Congressmen:

I oppose SOPA and PIPA.

Why?
SOPA and PIPA would put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won’t have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn’t being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won’t show up in major search engines. SOPA and PIPA would build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.

And yet SOPA & PIPA will NOT PREVENT ONLINE PIRACY. Isn’t that the whole point of these bills? Watch this video and you might understand why.
vimeo.com/31100268

The part of the video where typing the long numeric address will still take you to the site, this is how people who actively seek to pirate material will access these sites if they pass and then leave the burden on those who aren’t.

The fact that there’s NO DUE PROCESS means that if your site is mistaken as a copyright violator, there’s no easy recourse. No honest “ack, let me take that down, I didn’t realize” or even argue that you properly own the copyrights!

And if you think I don’t understand what I’m talking about, here’s how I would get to my business site if SOPA/PIPA were to decide I (or many of my clients) violated someone’s copyrights:

http://67.225.128.201/~fascina1/

<<-- that is my IP based address. I would have to change some of the image links and the htaccess files on some of my other sites.

And yes because I have multiple domain names using the same IP address, if one of my clients violated copyrights, more than one business site would go offline.

THIS WILL HURT THE SMALL BUSINESS ECONOMY.

Tomorrow when wikipedia is back online check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System_Security_Extensions

Annnnnd I think I started thinking about IP addresses too hard and got that bit about multiple sites coming down wrong. But it makes me want to go read the wording on how they expect to implement the removal of a copyright violating site. And also point out the the potential for human error in that process.

The photo isn’t great but it wasn’t scanning well either. I think because it’s on tracing paper. I don’t remember when I did it or if it was freehand or tracing over a photo.