"Joining the protest against two proposed federal Internet regulation bills, Wikipedia's English-language site will be blacked out for all of Wednesday, co-founder Jimmy Wales announced on Twitter today.
"Beginning at midnight ET on Jan. 18, visitors will see a protest message for 24 hours, Wales tweeted. The move will affect 30 million to 40 million users, he said, correcting an initial figure of 100 million.
"'This is going to be wow,' read one of his tweets.
"Wikipedia and several other sites are calling on lawmakers to block the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). They are concerned the laws will 'hold website owners liable for links to sources of illegal music and movie downloading, with a detrimental effect on free speech online,' The Financial Times reports."
I don't know enough about this legislation to make an informed comment on it, but I do know that Congress screws up everything it touches. Wikiless Wednesday! Power to the net!
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4 comments:
These are truly awful bills. Copyright infringement is already against the law...this lets media companies shut down anyone they THINK MIGHT be facilitating copyright infringement with no due process. Facilitate is a very broad term here...just providing a link to another site that hosts content would be enough to do it (even if the link is not to infringing content...if someone on the JTI linked to a legitimate page on another site and different page on that site hosted illegal content, they could request JTI be shut down...very broad as I said).
Additionally, there are provisions in there that would requite removal of sites from Domain Name Servers (DNS) which is what they are talking about when you hear someone say it would break the internet.
A bill for Hollywood, of Hollywood and by Hollywood.
What will the students do without their trusted and most utilized source wikipedia> {sarcasm}
I agree with hale-bopp here.
I wasn't going get deeper into how I feel about this, but I will...just a little. "Stealing" is a commonplace across the internet. Think Google Images, for example. We all use it copy and paste pics.
This bill effects all corners of the livelihood of the net-Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others.
It's the movie and music industry that want this, to shut down the "bootlegging"
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