

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

In the interest of preserving free speech,<p>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.<p>2) I pledge to keep access disabled until the vote is finalized.<p>3) Because SOPA's effects will be felt globally, I pledge to disable access to all users, regardless of geographical location.<p>4) I pledge to display a maintenance page directing people to more information on SOPA and how they can contact their representatives in Congress.<p>Who's with me?
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polyfractal
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
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.

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pawn
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.

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

~~~
Benares
<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.

