NEWS: Wikipedia joins web blackout in Sopa protest

by **Vektrix** Wed Jan 18, 2012 12:35 pm

Wikipedia plans to take its English-language site offline on Wednesday as part of protests against proposed anti-piracy laws in the US.

The user-generated news site Reddit and the blog Boing Boing have also said they will take part in the "blackout".

The sites' webmasters are opposed to the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) being debated by Congress.

However, Twitter has declined to take part in the shutdown.

Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, told the BBC: "Proponents of Sopa have characterised the opposition as being people who want to enable piracy or defend piracy.

"But that's not really the point. The point is the bill is so over broad and so badly written that it's going to impact all kinds of things that, you know, don't have anything to do with stopping piracy."

Veto hint
Sopa's supporters in the House of Representatives say the legislation is designed to stop revenue flowing to "rogue websites". A similar bill, Pipa, is making its way through the US Senate.

On Saturday the White House issued a statement that appeared to side with critics of the legislation.

It said: "While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet."

Despite the hint of a presidential veto, Wikipedia said that the English site's administrators had decided to stage its first ever public protest because the bills "would be devastating to the free and open web".

It added: "We don't think Sopa is going away, and Pipa is still quite active. Moreover, Sopa and Pipa are just indicators of a much broader problem. All around the world, we're seeing the development of legislation intended to fight online piracy, and regulate the internet in other ways, that hurt online freedoms."

However, when asked whether Twitter would join the blackout, its chief executive, SPORE Costolo, tweeted: "Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish."

In a Twitter conversation with Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales, Mr Costolo later clarified that his comment was not meant to be read as a "value judgement" about other organisations involvement in the action.

The anti-piracy legislation still has high profile supporters including News Corporation's chairman, Rupert Murdoch.

Over the weekend he tweeted: "So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery."

He later added: "Seems like universal anger with POTUS [President of the United States] from all sorts of normal supporters... Whole entertainment industry employs 2.2 million [on] average salary $65,000. Good jobs and expanding foreign earnings. Made in America, too!"

Sites taking part in the shutdown plan to go offline for 24 hours from midnight Eastern Standard Time (05:00 GMT) on Wednesday

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16590585
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act (will be down Weds 18 January 2011)
http://mashable.com/2012/01/17/sopa-companies-dark-list (list of sites that are participating in protest)

I have several things to say about this.

1) From what I understand, the entire bill is essentially collating other parts of law into one single act. I am not aware that the US is not allowed to seek court orders outside it's own governance. Copyright Law is already very prescriptive and with the use of borders, no doubt it brings in use of laws regarding foreign relations.

2) Baring the above in mind, the law is somewhat superfluous, since most things it covers are already illegal or covered in statute, however, the "new" elements are essentially going to be unenforceable. It just takes the country in which the site is actually registered in or operating from to reject the request and the law falls flat on it's face. Does the US seriously think it can, in essence, block almost the entire internet, since a conservative estimate (by me) is that 90% of websites will have smoe conent that violates the law.

3) Does the US government seriously think every Tom, SPORE, Harry, Jane, Martha and Sally is going to ensure EVERY SINGLE element of their site is free from copyright issues? What about those sites (like EuroSpore for instance) that use original materials (thanks Marky and others), but do not ACTUALLY own the copyright on them? Again, we use a lot of material on other websites (like in this post for instance, I copy and pasted from the BBC) to aid in our conversations, debates and discussions.

If the US want this to work, they need to get EVERY OTHER COUNTRY ON THE PLANET to also pass it as a law and then ENFORCE it for it to work. Take this site for starters;

Domain is registered in the UK.
Site is run by individuals from UK, Switzerland and Australia.
Server is in France.
Members are from all over Europe, United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil and possibly Asia/Africa.

SOPA is a waste of time and energy if you ask me.

by **Andeavor** Thu Jan 19, 2012 7:34 am

It's all legal hullabaloo, if you ask me. The internet is in that legal grey area of globally applicable law. What a country can do is ban certain websites. many middle eastern and asian countries already ban thousands of western-based websites that provide content that is illegal in those countries, however those countries are autocracies, which can allow anything they want.

In my local news outlet one person brought a brilliant comment into the discussion:

"The law highlights the entertainment industry's lack of understanding of the digital world. Instead of breaking away from their naive paradigm and adjusting their business models, they'd rather have blockages and censorship. One only hopes those enterprises go bankrupt and leave room for new, innovative startups."

by **TyrannoFan** Mon Jan 23, 2012 3:38 am

lol, SOPA didn't get passed but the US government shut down megaupload.com anyway... literally the day after SOPA didn't get passed.

by **LordRemington** Fri Jan 27, 2012 5:50 pm

Well on a related not to this, whether or not people felt the blackouts were necessary, it seems they have succeeded in stopping SOPA and PIPA for the time being. I personally am glad wikipedia and other major sites too part in fighting SOPA and PIPA.

It wasn't the idea necessarily that was the issue, it was the poor wording of the bill which would give big businesses and corporations power to shut down anything they deem to be copy-right infringement without any due process or investigation, thus using the many loop holes in the bill could supress freedom of speech or exchange of ideas on the internet.

but alas it may have been all in vain if ACTA goes through.

by **Vektrix** Sat Jan 28, 2012 12:36 am

It is not a new thing, Napster (quite rightly IMHO) got taken to task. There is a different problem though now, and that is that the sistes, such as megaupload, photobucket, imageshack, filesonic and rapidshare etc. that allow you to store your videos and images are also used by those either own the copyright themselves or to house stuff that has no official copyright. These sites are being used to host family albums and videos for instance. Whereas when Napster was defeated, that was not the case.

Cloud computing has essentially deemed copyright law unenforceable in a way, in so far as to shut down each site will also exclude those that use the site legitimately. Equally, whilst the US has been tightening (or trying to tighten), the UK has been loosening them. It used to be illegal to purchase a CD, then Burn it to your computer for personal use (what I do because I believe the artist deserves the money, but didn't want the songs on CD, and would rather manage my MP3's well, which ias why I hate iTunes), suffice to say, as long as do not give the burnt track away or share it, you can no longer be charged with copyright theft.

I just think it is certain individuals (it could have been from any country) who are being fascistic about intellectual property. Part of the problem is that the general public perceive artists as getting too much money - even though when they started out, many of them couldn't make ends meet.

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