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English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout
  • RobertoRoberto

    Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate—that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.

    http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_blackout

  • 6 Replies sorted by
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Can anyone tell me how it'll "seriously damage the free and open Internet"?

    Today you can close anything that don't have big money with simple DCMA (and EU alternatives).

    Google is filtering sites without any courts, already, just by requests. They proudly write about themselfs. How they are fighting with "piracy".

  • RobertoRoberto

    I'd hate someone to take away our ability to hack our GH.x cameras!

    "In addition to going after websites allegedly directly involved in copyright infringement, a proposal in SOPA will allow the government to target sites that simply provide information that could help users get around the bills’ censorship mechanisms". https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @Roberto

    Calm down.

    As I said, you can close many sites with current laws. In a few days.

    All this story with SOPA is, most probably, made up to allow passing for "revised and deeply improved" variant after some time. This is one of the common crowd manupulation techniques.

  • holmes6holmes6

    SOPA had DNS hacking as a requirement, which would give the US Government new powers they did not have before to block websites using a different method. This is done in China already and it causes serious problems for regular internet users. Just this made it vastly more toxic vs. dmca imo.

    "All this story with SOPA is, most probably, made up to allow passing for "revised and deeply improved" variant after some time. This is one of the common crowd manupulation techniques."

    Agree with the quoted

  • fatpigfatpig

    good thing i dont need google to get to this page. ;) no censorship here, yet!

  • RobertoRoberto

    I once new someone who brought in by Microsoft to film their in-house lawyers in a workshop teaching those lawyers to respond to journalists asking awkward questions about so-called anti-competitive practices of the time. The media trainer got each lawyer to respond to each question by changing the subject: to computer piracy. Yep, piracy. Change the subject, claim the higher moral ground. Now, am I reading too much into this by thinking this debate may talk piracy while all the time having other practices in mind?

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