Reddit Blackout on January 18 To Protest SOPA

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Reddit admins announce January 18 blackout to protest SOPA
By Jeff Hughes | Digital Trends ? 10 hrs ago

The Internet has been rumbling and mobilizing in response to SOPA. One of the latest acts of protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act is a planned blackout by social website reddit on January 18.

Reddit admins announced the plan in a blog post on Tuesday. The post acknowledged the activism by redditors in the fight against ?powerful forces trying to censor the Internet.? However, the admins explained that it was time for the next stage of the fight, and they?ve decided they will be blacking out reddit on January 18. The blackout will last all day from 8am to 8pm Eastern Standard Time.

Instead of the normal reddit gumbo, visitors will be treated to a message about the impact of the PIPA/SOPA legislation on sites such as reddit. Along with the message will be links to resources for visitors to research the legislation. Reddit will also be showcasing a live video stream of ?Internet entrepreneurs and technical experts? testifying at the House hearing. And for those of you looking for activist activities, like meetups or campaigns against PIPA/SOPA, reddit will be spotlighting these that day.

This is a preliminary sketch for what reddit plans on showing on the website, but the community is still welcome to suggest further ideas for what the site will do with its extra cycles on January 18. Reddit has been at the frontlines for activism against SOPA. Last month, members lead a boycott to move domains from GoDaddy, which resulted in the domain registrar reversing its position on the legislation. In the fight against SOPA, Wikipedia recently considered a blackout of its site for all English-language articles.

The threat of the SOPA legislation seems to be pushing some into tight, desperate corners, but the reddit admins say, ?we?re not taking this action lightly. We wouldn?t do this if we didn?t believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to reddit and the Internet as we know it.?

[ame="http://news.yahoo.com/reddit-admins-announce-january-18-blackout-protest-sopa-062713699.html"]Reddit admins announce January 18 blackout to protest SOPA - Yahoo News[/ame]
 
I really do hope that this will make the Senate wake up & recognize just what kinda damage this will really do to us. I mean theyre just as corrupt as a lot of us, yet they wanna censor stuff that they even get into. How does that make sense? They need to realize that theyre technically bout to mess themselves over as well.
 
A lot of people think reddit should blackout on any election days as well, as a way to motivate people to get out and vote
 
I think it's funny how they'd even contemplate this. It's so against the 1st amendment, it isn't even funny.
 
zetas said:
Elaborate in a more understandable way, please.
Click to expand...

The first amendment basically protects you from abridged freedom of speech. Basically the SOPA act infringes on freedom of speech.

On a side note though, if the government thinks they can break that then they have another thing coming.. because I'm sure that they're getting some people out there pretty mad.
 
I thought it was understandable. Phobus is alluding that SOPA would restrict Free Speech, violating the First Amendment. That the bill's host wouldn't even realize that and continue to push towards enacting it is really scary.
 
The Stop Online Piracy Act hit a wall over the weekend after The White House came out against the bill. The Hill reports on comments from house oversight chairman Darrell Issa, who was assured by majority leader Eric Cantor that more work was needed ?to address outstanding concerns and work to build consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote.?

Shortly before that statement, SOPA sponsor chairman Lamar Smith offered to make significant concessions to the section of the bill that would require ISPs to block offending sites, but it wasn?t enough. SOPA?s Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act, is still on the table, however.

The White House commented on SOPA in response to two protest petitions on the White House Blog, saying that ?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.?

Later in the statement: ?We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet. Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security.?

There has been huge opposition to the bill from all corners of the Internet. Reddit, Google and Twitter have been joined by a large number of games companies, publishers and concerned gamers worried about SOPA, including MLG, Epic, Trion, Riot Games, 38 Studios, Nival, Mojang, Frozenbyte, Nvidia and more.

With the Protect IP Act still being considered in the senate, the battle to hold back draconian anti-piracy legislation is far from over, and SOPA is likely to come back in some amended form in the future. PIPA is itself a rewritten version of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act which failed to pass a couple of years ago. Still, good news for now.

source: pcgamer
 
SOPA was only one part of the dilemma. PIPA, the Senate version of the bill is still being discussed. We aren't out of the woods yet.
 
Ding, Dong SOPA is Dead
Jason Mick (Blog) - January 16, 2012 10:40 AM

The House Oversight Chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has long been a stern critic of the Orwellian "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) (H.R. 3261). The representative announced some huge news on Monday. He reveals that Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) promised to shelve any potential vote in the Republican-controlled House in terms of passing SOPA.

The bill was likened to a death penalty to the internet economy by DailyTech and other sites -- the bills looked to create a takedown system where any site found to be hosting user generated content pointing to infringing content (say a URL to a torrent) could be immediately taken down.

This would have been a crippling blow to Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN), Google Inc. (GOOG), online news, and any other site that allows user-generated content, as a malicious user (e.g. a prankster or competitor) could intentionally plant an offending URL and then contact the regulators to take down the site for weeks at a time. The measure would essentially have ended all American online commerce, online searching, and online news ,if enforced.

The "death" of SOPA comes just hours after President Barack Obama made headlines when his close advisors came out against SOPA. Some heralded the opposition as a hint that the President might veto the bill to prevent catastrophic economic damage.

The stalling of SOPA is only a partial victory, as the similar "PROTECT IP Act" (PIPA) (S.968) is moving towards a vote in the Senate.

Big media paid approximately 10 percent of active U.S. Senators' total combined election costs in the last election cycle. Many of these same big media companies who are looking to imprison file sharing Americans recently plead guilty to stealing tens of millions of dollars in work in Canada alone, from independent artists.

Rep. Issa who has also recently made a name for himself -- in part -- by opposing President Obama's strict fuel economy mandates, says he will continue to work with advocacies and with America's tech luminaries like Google to fight PIPA in the Senate.

He remarks, "Right now, the focus of protecting the Internet needs to be on the Senate where Majority Leader Reid has announced his intention to try to move similar legislation in less than two weeks."

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=23791
 
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