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I blacked out this blog during most of Wednesday, 18 January, to protest against SOPA, which, although an American bill that will censor the internet, is a bill that will affect all of us, regardless of what country we live in. You can read about SOPA below. SOPA isn’t the only troubling bill, there is another called PIPA and, in EU countries ( like UK), there is ACTA doing the same thing. I am not supporting illegal downloading or actual copyright theft but these bills are not the way to deal with those.
These bills aim to turn over ownership of the internet to corporations and government.
Here’s a video with the clearest explanation of SOPA and PIPA that I’ve found
by Clay Shirky at TED
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SITES YOU USE EVERY DAY COULD BE BLOCKED IF THESE BILLS PASS
In Europe, we have ACTA threatening the internet in the same way.
The EU will soon be voting on ACTA.
YOUR ISP COULD POLICE EVERYTHING YOU DO IF ACTA/SOPA/PIPA GO THROUGH
Click the the link below (I couldn’t get it to just embed on WordPress) to see a VIDEO about ACTA
http://mediakit.laquadrature.net/embed/716?size=medium
Text information about ACTA can be found HERE
Don’t go thinking only sites offering pirated music and videos will be blocked, it doesn’t work that way at all. If your ISP is made responsible for blocking sites you go to, can you expect them (or the government who is telling them to) to get it right, to not just block many, many sites fairly randomly in order to just be on the safe side? It will just take someone leaving a comment on your blog or site, with a link in that comment to a site that the government doesn’t like (or has a link to a site that has a link to a site… etc) for your blog or site to be blocked. As you see, your blog/site’s connection an actual copyright offender can be several steps removed and actually nothing to do with you, for YOUR blog/site to be completely and permanently blocked and good luck trying to reverse that, as they don’t look into your innocence before blocking it. Your ISP and web host will probably drop you too, if that happens. They will inevitably block many sites that there is absolutely no reason to block. This can affect not only you but medical staff who rely on the internet for information, people doing important research that can benefit us all and all sorts of other people who need to use the internet for good.
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Meanwhile, more about the US bill SOPA.
This is a good explanation of the problems of SOPA and PIPA
Here are some reactions to the USA’s SOPA bill
“It contains provisions that will chill innovation. It contains provisions that will tinker with the fundamental fabric of the internet. It gives private corporations the power to censor. And best of all, it bypasses due legal process to do much of it.”
“When ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled and people constrained in their choices, the Internet is diminished for all of us.. There isn’t an economic Internet and a social Internet and a political Internet. There’s just the Internet.”
”The potential for abuse of power through digital networks – upon which we as citizens now depend for nearly everything, including our politics – is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age … This is no time for politicians and industry lobbyists in Washington to be devising new Internet censorship mechanisms, adding new opportunities for abuse of corporate and government power over online speech.”
SOPA stands for ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ and may, from that title. seem a fair idea but it affects way more than things like downloading pirate copies of music or video; it will also affect people who don’t do that.
Michael Geist says,
While there is little that people living outside the U.S. can do to influence SOPA and PIPA, there are many reasons why it is important for everyone to participate in tomorrow’s [18 January 2012] SOPA protest.
First, the SOPA provisions are designed to have an extra-territorial effect in countries around the world.
Second, non-U.S. businesses and websites could easily find themselves targeted by SOPA. The bill grants the U.S. “in rem” jurisdiction over any website that does not have a domestic jurisdictional connection.
Third, millions rely on the legitimate sites that are affected by the legislation. Whether creating a Wikipedia entry, posting a comment on Reddit, running a WordPress blog, participating in an open source software project, or reading a posting on Boing Boing, the lifeblood of the Internet is a direct target of SOPA. If non-Americans remain silent, they may ultimately find the sites and services they rely upon silenced by this legislation.
Fourth, the U.S. intellectual property strategy has long been premised on exporting its rules to other countries. SOPA virtually guarantees that this will continue.
Any site that offers a link to a copyright infringer, or has a vague connection with a site that does, may be blocked, which means Google and all other search engines will likely go, as will Wikipedia and pretty much all the other useful sites online.
To add insult to injury, a good number of the SOPA and PIPA sponsors and supporters are blatant copyright infringers themselves, doing the very thing they say they are trying to stop. For example, PIPA co-sponsor Senator Roy Blunt’s Twitter page displayed a background photo that he used without the photographer’s permission, which he removed after he was caught using it (you can see a screenshot of it below, captured before he had it replaced). The photographer’s wife states that not only did he not have permission to use the photo, but she was in the photo, so it gave the false impression that she was a supporter of his.
Other bill supporting, copyright infringement offenders in the US government: Claire McCaskill (D-MO) (who ineptly swapped out her infringing Twitter profile image for another infringing image — nice one!), Dennis Ross (R-FL) (technically a SOPA supporter, as he’s in the House), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH). They all bitch about copyright infringement and yet they do it themselves.
Here is the full text of the SOPA bill, as of Jan. 15, 2012
And an easier to read information page by Mashable, here
If you live here in UK or anywhere in the EU, please don’t overlook ACTA. It is just as damaging to the internet as SOPA and PIPA and time is running out to fight it. If you don’t want to lose access to a huge amount of the internet, do something about it. Information about how it is HERE
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To see a vast selection of fabulous, vintage and antique Japanese kimonos, visit wafuku.co.uk. Based in Scotland and selling worldwide. Whether you want to own and wear a real kimono, a beautiful piece of wearable Japanese textile art, or hang one for display or even just have a look at stunningly beautiful kimonos, you may enjoy browsing through the selection on my site. I have high quality, vintage kimonos, obis and accessories (and much more) for men, women and children. Pop over to wafuku.co.uk and have a look
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