STRIKE AGAINST SOPA and PIPA, Do Not Stand for Internet Censorship

Today, we are striking against censorship. Join us in this historic moment: tell Congress to stop this bill now!

Go to the SOPAStrike.com website by clicking here to send an email to your representatives in Congress. While it only takes a moment of your time, you will see continuing rewards from helping to maintain a free and open Internet experience for yourself, your friends, your family, and all other netizens.

UPDATE: Below are screenshots of some of the protest home pages by companies against SOPA/PIPA:

Google.com

Reddit.com

WordPress.com

Firefox Start Page

Tom’s Hardware Review Site is Against SOPA, Too

Tom’s Hardware posted the following message today on their website (click the link to read all of the reasons why a hardware and software review site would be against the Stop Online Piracy Act):

Here at Tom’s Hardware, you know we don’t typically get political because with the heated debates between AMD vs. Intel who needs Donkeys vs. Elephants?

We’ve got no agenda beyond providing the best hardware news and reviews we can dig up. But here at Year’s end, there’s a subject we want to share with you that may come to affect how you experience us and the rest of the internet. It’s called SOPA, or the “Stop Online Piracy Act”, and it is headed through U.S. Congress with its sister bill PROTECT-IP in the Senate. SOPA threatens to fundamentally change the way information is presented online by placing massive restrictions on user-generated content like posts to forums, video uploads, podcasts or images.

via Save Tom’s, Stop SOPA.

We have to work together to stop this terrible legislation. Go here to find out how you can help by alerting your elected representatives to the problems that this kind of over broad and misguided legislation.

Big Internet Companies Could Hold Their Own Demonstrations in 2012

Declan McCullagh reports on CNET News that the big Internet companies could launch simultaneous anti-censorship protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act in 2012:

The Internet’s most popular destinations, including eBay, Google, Facebook, and Twitter seem to view Hollywood-backed copyright legislation as an existential threat.

It was Google co-founder Sergey Brin who warned that the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act “would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.” Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman argue that the bills give the Feds unacceptable “power to censor the Web.”

But these companies have yet to roll out the heavy artillery.

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you’ll know they’re finally serious.

via SOPA opponents may go nuclear and other 2012 predictions | Privacy Inc. – CNET News.

Rackspace Hosting CEO Lanham Napier Gives a Reasoned Business Perspective Why SOPA Is a Bad Law

Lanham Napier, CEO of cloud hosting provider Rackspace, argues on the official Rackspace Hosting blog that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is not the right solution to intellectual property theft:

The authors of the bill say their goal is to crack down on websites that traffic in stolen movies, music, software, and other intellectual property. That’s a goal that we at Rackspace share. But we’ve studied the SOPA bill closely and conferred with experts in our company and elsewhere in the technology industry, and we believe that it would not achieve its stated purpose. Foreign IP thieves, in particular, could find ways to evade the law.

Meanwhile, SOPA would require that Rackspace and other Internet service providers censor their customers with little in the way of due process, trumping the protections present in the current Digital Millennium Copyright Act. What’s more, the SOPA bill would seriously disrupt the Domain Name Service that is crucial to the smooth operation of the web.

via Rackspace Cloud Computing & Hosting.

Make your voice heard by contacting your elected representatives in Congress. The Stop American Censorship website can help you.

Adam Savage of the Mythbusters Comes Out Swinging Against SOPA

Adam Savage weighs in on the Stop Online Piracy Act on PopularMechanics.com:

Right now Congress is considering two bills—the Protect IP Act, and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—that would be laughable if they weren’t in fact real. Honestly, if a friend wrote these into a piece of fiction about government oversight gone amok, I’d have to tell them that they were too one-dimensional, too obviously anticonstitutional.

Make no mistake: These bills aren’t simply unconstitutional, they are anticonstitutional. They would allow for the wholesale elimination of entire websites, domain names, and chunks of the DNS (the underlying structure of the whole Internet), based on nothing more than the “good faith” assertion by a single party that the website is infringing on a copyright of the complainant. The accused doesn’t even have to be aware that the complaint has been made.

via MythBuster Adam Savage: SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It – Popular Mechanics.

Tell your congressional representatives that you don’t want your Internet fucked up just to appease Big Media’s desire to control the Internet medium. Big Media companies certainly aren’t wanting for cash, and their executives could always use a bigger salary [read more here].

It’s Not Just Technical: There are Legal Reasons Why SOPA and PROTECT-IP Are Wrong

Mark Lemley, David S. Levin, and David G. Post write in the Stanford Law Review that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect-IP are misguided laws that take a “sledgehammer” approach to policing the Internet without judicial oversight. They write:

These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country’s tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information and ideas on the Internet. At a time when many foreign governments have dramatically stepped up their efforts to censor Internet communications, these bills would incorporate into U.S. law a principle more closely associated with those repressive regimes: a right to insist on the removal of content from the global Internet, regardless of where it may have originated or be located, in service of the exigencies of domestic law.

via Don’t Break the Internet – Stanford Law Review.

It’s almost Christmas, but Santa needs some help giving coal to the big media financed congressional representatives and senators. Go here to find out how to give ’em hell!

First spied on BoingBoing here.

Lamar Smith Moves for Another Committee Meeting on SOPA Just Before Christmas

Mike Masnick writes on TechDirt that the adjournment of the Judiciary committee marking up SOPA might be pulling a fast one to get this bill on the floor as soon as the congressional recess is over:

Update…. Or not. Despite the fact that Congress was supposed to be out of session until the end of January, the Judiciary Committee has just announced plans to come back to continue the markup this coming Wednesday. This is rather unusual and totally unnecessary. But it shows just how desperate Hollywood is to pass this bill as quickly as possible, before the momentum of opposition builds up even further.

via SOPA Markup Runs Out Of Time; Likely Delayed Until 2012 [Update: Or Not…] | Techdirt.

Cory Doctorow adds on BoingBoing:

If you followed my tweets from the markup session for SOPA in the House of Representatives, you know how frustrating it was to watch: you had these lawmakers blithely dismissing the security concerns of the likes of Vint Cerf, saying things like, “I’m no technology nerd, but I don’t believe it.” In other words: “I’m a perfect ignoramus, but I find it convenient to disregard the world’s foremost experts.” Another congressman from Florida kept saying things like “No one can explain to me how this bill harms political debate or academic freedom.”

The markup hearing ended early yesterday, surprising many who concluded that the early adjournment meant that SOPA was off the table until Congress reconvened in 2012. But committee chair Lamar Smith quietly announced that there would be a special session on the 21st of December (when the press and opponents of the bill are likely to be distracted by the impending holiday) to finish up the bill’s markup.

via WTF is Happening with SOPA now? | BoingBoing.net

I call this political maneuvering the rhetoric of refusal and it frustrates me beyond belief. It is kind of like someone stands outside a burning building with a fire hose turned off. They look at the burning building and they say, “I don’t see a burning building.” Bystanders yell at the person, “turn on the fire hose! Put water on the burning building.” The person with the hose replies to no one, “I don’t hear anyone telling me that a building is burning.”

I suppose the rhetoric of refusal arises from the deep seated anti-intellectualism that has hijacked the political discourse, or I should say that anti-intellectualism that isn’t financed by deep pockets. It is almost if an intelligent individual won’t be heard unless there is corporate sponsorship. It increasingly seems as if American politics is a new form of NASCAR, and this is bad. I like NASCAR, but I don’t like my government and the political process to be like NASCAR.

Even if you have already contacted your representative about SOPA, you have to do it again. We can’t stop voicing our concerns about this until it disappears again. And then when it comes back, we will fight once more.