Wikipedia shutting down for 1 day?


Where does it end? Soon it will be illegal to link to anything that, in an arbitrarily long chain of links, might possibly lead to some source of pirated material. IE: links will be illegal.
As you say. They would like to see that each link has to be legally approved and white-listed before it can be followed.


The response will be an encrypted overlay Internet which does not rely on servers to host content but instead consists of a network of many small participating nodes which publish and consume content in equal measure. These already exist, they are just not popular.


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I like this action as well. I hope it will be just as successful as the action against Go Daddy.


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The "Learn more" link on the Wikipedia blackout explicitly tells you that you can easily read any article by disabling Javascript or using a mobile device. The community wanted to still be able to access Wikipedia if it was an emergency.
 
***** NEWS ALERT ******* Since Senator Joe Lieberman's website is down. HAHA, nice work Anonymous. Give his office a call and ask him to resign: (202) 224-4041 This phone call is very important, otherwise we might not be having this conversation. Press 2 and give a member of his staff an earful. I just did and it felt great!!!!!!


Also call: Sen. Patrick Leahy [D, VT]


Phone: 202-224-4242, he coauthored this junk too and his office people are trying to argue in favor of it
 
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Gotta protect America from those gosh darned Foreign Criminals! Yeee haw! (Sorry, I know the American folks here are intelligent, and are not at all racist ignorant bigots who would subscribe to such flimsy propaganda as that which the MPAA likes to spout!)
 
Since when has Wikipedia been a reliable official source for research?

Wikipedia has ALWAYS been a very useful resource for research, precisely because it urges articles to include as much referencing as possible. You can get a good overview of material then seek the relevant references to get more detailed information and/or verification.


It's not suitable as a source in and of itself for obvious reasons but I would go so far as to claim it's one of the best things to happen to private learning.
 
Gotta protect America from those gosh darned Foreign Criminals! Yeee haw! (Sorry, I know the American folks here are intelligent, and are not at all racist ignorant bigots who would subscribe to such flimsy propaganda as that which the MPAA likes to spout!)

Not only that, but the good ol' USofA must destroy the Pirates* at all cost.


*Dirty thugs with eye-patches who pilliage, kill and sink ships.
 
The Pirate Bay created this "press release", which is interesting and kind of funny:


http://static.thepir.../legal/sopa.txt

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.


PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.


Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for


the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person


to own the copyright to a motion picture.


Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures


in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call


Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.


There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like


Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.


So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they


circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works,


without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they're all successful and most of the


studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it's all based on being


able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create.


If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing


other peoples rules.


The reason they are always complainting about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the


rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow


people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take


over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them).


It's all based on the fact that we're competition.


We've proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We're just better than they are.


And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech.


We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws


should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.


The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we've stayed out of the


USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this:


The word SOPA means "trash" in Swedish. The word PIPA means "a pipe" in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence.


They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the


rest of us obedient consumers.


The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you'll learn that noone wants to be fed with


trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that


you will stop them, before we all drown.


SOPA can't do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we'll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the


hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to


mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.


To fix the "problem of piracy" one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they're


creating "culture" but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls


become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching


movies and tv shows that make them think that they're fat.


In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones


is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had


no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he's complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy


in the world - because he's jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you'd get a more


honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.


Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can't access this information


when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that.


THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012
 
The Pirate Bay press release sounds about right, the US seems to want total control the internet and the world.


Toned it down a bit, sorry I felt angry last night.
 
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Seems the protest may have been successful, with 18 senators changing their votes. It's still not a sure bet to fail, but at the moment, if it passes it will do so with a small enough majority that it at least has the possibility of a presidential veto.
 
Seems the protest may have been successful, with 18 senators changing their votes. It's still not a sure bet to fail, but at the moment, if it passes it will do so with a small enough majority that it at least has the possibility of a presidential veto.

This is good news, but alas not yet good enough. What I'm particularly worried about is the fickle nature of the internet; now the Blackout is over, the vast majority of people just don't care anymore, and have turned instead to making jokes about a certain musician's debut on Twitter.


SOPA needs to be stopped dead. In its current form it's never going to be modified enough to make it acceptable to those of us who deem it a real threat. PIPA is even worse, and represents the aspect of SOPA with real technological concerns.


Whilst I totally agree that piracy needs to be fought, this is not the way to do it. The only correct stance to take is to be completely against SOPA/PIPA, and hope that they are shot down without chance of revival.


It occurs to me that Hollywood is behind this push, and that Movie piracy is really the main issue. It's clear that phrases such as "protect american jobs from foreign criminals" are coming direct from the mouths of the MPAA, who care more about protecting their own wallets than anything else, and not from any governmental body which is generally concerned about a loss of American jobs to movie piracy ( there isn't one, it's utter horse shit and America has far bigger problems than Piracy to say the very least ).


However, these acts seek to place the responsibility of stopping piracy on everyone. Not just every American, but everyone in any country which is even slightly friendly towards the US of A. Note: that doesn't include any of these "Foreign Criminals" who will, by and large, tell the MPAA to shove a cactus up their collective ass and will continue to operate as normal.


We shouldn't be burdened with this responsibility, or the legal repercussions that come with not effectively upholding it to whatever arbitrary level is decided at the time.


What's happening is that technology is making movie piracy easier, and rather than attempting to set up sane distribution channels, and push new movie releases to services like Netflix ( I subscribe to both Netflix AND Lovefilm at the moment, but they're just not good enough in the UK ) the movie industry is still expecting to tie viewers into the box office and disgustingly overpriced DVD/Blu-Ray sales.


American jobs are at risk not from foreign criminals, but a change in consumer demand. That's par for the course in any industry, and using the government to pass despicable, over-broad acts which burden those same consumers with the responsibility of policing the entire internet is the wrong way to go about things.
 
Cynical Robert thinks the politicians are still lying. I don't quite understand how a flurry of tweets and complaints can give a Senator an epiphany and realize how bad SOPA and friends were.


Honestly, it looks like a big power play by the Republicans, with (as I count now) 16 republican Senators that jumped ship (probably by the urging of party leaders), while just two democrats stopped supporting it, also.


Election posturing? Republicans'll probably use this to show how 'in touch' they are with the public, and point at the democrats at pushing for more government control. So less of a "Look, SOPA is actually bad" and more of a "Look, we can use SOPA to burn the Democrats in the next election. Let's rally!"
 
I think Cynical Robert is probably correct. Nothing in politics is ever as it seems.


Although you've got to hand it to these guys, if they really do publicly oppose SOPA then they're *ALLEGEDLY* probably passing up a fat underhanded pay cheque from the MPAA and its cronies. *ALLEGEDLY*


Ho, ho, d'oh.
 
Well, that explains Conservapedia's article on SOPA. At first I thought the crap about democrats and liberals was thrown in randomly just because Conservapedians hate democrats and liberals. Now I know there's some kind of connection: Republican political stunt.
 
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American jobs are at risk not from foreign criminals, but a change in consumer demand. That's par for the course in any industry, and using the government to pass despicable, over-broad acts which burden those same consumers with the responsibility of policing the entire internet is the wrong way to go about things.
It's pretty typical of businesses that are facing death by disruption (something which nobody can deny the movie industry is facing, as it's failed to rise to customer demand, and will slowly but surely perish as smaller players in the vein of Netflix and the like actually bother to do what people are asking for), by my understanding of that.


I'm pretty sure that the same has happened in the US before, with things like the car industry (for example), who I gather were being undercut by manufacturers elsewhere, and instead of competing, had the government acting to protect their revenue.


(As an aside, Gadge, is Netflix's UK selection better than what's shown on the website, or is that all there is? I'm tempted to give the free trial a spin, but only if the selection is decent. :p )
 
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