2 days before SOPA vote I will shutdown my websites in protest. Will you?

5 points by Benares 14 years ago | 5 comments

In the interest of preserving free speech,

1) I hereby pledge to disable access to all (or most) of the content featured on my websites 48 hours before the full house vote (date unknown ATM) on SOPA in the U.S. Congress.

2) I pledge to keep access disabled until the vote is finalized.

3) Because SOPA's effects will be felt globally, I pledge to disable access to all users, regardless of geographical location.

4) I pledge to display a maintenance page directing people to more information on SOPA and how they can contact their representatives in Congress.

Who's with me?

polyfractal 14 years ago |

I don't mean to be "that guy", but unless your sites have a lot of traffic from non-technical people, I frankly doubt anyone will care.

Most techies already know about SOPA, already dislike it and have probably already signed a petition/called/written. If they haven't by now, they aren't going to.

Putting a message on a tech blog/website is like preaching to the choir at this point.

Benares 14 years ago | |

My sites are relatively insignificant, I only reach an audience of 100k-200k users.

My post was intended as a message of encouragement for those with a significant non-techie userbase to bite the bullet and consider a protest shutdown.

It's my belief that non-techie users are far more likely to take an anti-SOPA shutdown maintenance page more seriously than a forum post or added element in the regular page layout of a site.

pawn 14 years ago |

I might do that 48 hours before. In the meantime, I've put a big fat message on my front page (http://gamerhighway.com). I think between now and whenever the vote is, others ought to do the same.

sless 14 years ago |

Perhaps you can help me here; how does SOPA infringe on Free Speech again? Please layout your argument in detail.

Benares 14 years ago | |

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3261:

All actions in 102(c)(2) are extremely broad. An entire "foreign infringing site" can be knocked offline and blacklisted solely on the assertion (of self-interested corporate players and their AG cronies) that there is criminal copyright infringement occurring on the site. A public forum with 1 million non-infringing posts and 1 infringing post can theoretically be killed by the AG. In my opinion this will lead to an uptick in self-censorship by website owners desperate to avoid losing everything. And those that do get targeted get no chance to make their case in the court of law or even file a counter-notice like the DMCA so _graciously_ allows (and we all know how effective that system has turned out to be.) A public forum is blacklisted and all you get is a nice letter in the mail.

I also believe the danger of prior restraint comes into play in the immunity clauses of 102(c)(5). No claim or cause of action against service providers, domain registrars, search engines, payment networks, or ad services is allowed for "reasonable acts" designed to comply with SOPA court orders. The likely result of this is hair-trigger blocking of websites at the first sniff of a court order. Why not? They get immunity for that behavior.

The anti-circumvention penalties in 102(c)(4) are naked censorship provisions. In my opinion, code is a form of speech, potentially protected by the 1st amendment. The authors of SOPA obviously feel differently.

And finally, SOPA will mandate the build-out of a new infrastructure dedicated to censoring websites quickly, based on a "master list" stewarded by the AG and compiled by his corporate paymasters. Others have argued, and I tend to agree, that the mere existance of such an infrastructure makes it all the more likely that lawmakers will seek to expand it's purview to other areas (domestic sites, "terrorist sites", etc.) in the future.