There are, perhaps famously, two bills in the national legislature right now which are threatening to disrupt everything the Internet has accomplished over the last decade or more in terms of openness, discovery, and innovation. These bills are SOPA and PIPA. I believe they are both bad (very bad in fact) and I want you to understand them as best as is possible.
Here is a great discussion of the material history behind these two bills and a discussion of how they will likely impact you and I as well as a brief discussion of why they will not have any of their claimed intended effects on piracy.
The important part to understand is that removing sites from the name system will not make those sites inaccessible. Those sites will still be accessible using their numeric IP addresses and using links created with those numeric addresses.
However, giving corporations the power to remove my site or your site or any site from the name system because they believe it is in their best interest (without due process and without court-worthy evidence)… well, that just puts the biggest bully in charge of the playground.
Please watch the above video; please educate yourself on matters of fare-use and sharing; please tell your elected representatives what we have discovered and how bills like these will be bad for all of us; and please watch the sky for signs of bills like this raining down in the future.
Useful Links:
They imply the cause was the Internet blackout but it’s probably more accurate to credit it to the wider digital grass-roots protest movement which flared up against these two bills, but here is a graphic to let you know what sort of power we can have when we get together on something we decide is important.
Turning the tides…