Joel Convinced Me – Don’t “Go Dark”, Go #Misbehavin Over SOPA

This morning, I had planned to take HT dark for 24 hours in protest of SOPA and PIPA, the corporate “anti-piracy” internet legislation winding its way through Congress.

While I agree that piracy is an issue, I believe these two bills are draconian in nature, as they allow corporations and the government to force ISPs to censor or even completely remove websites from the internet.

There are better ways to combat piracy.

From the EFF:

Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the Internet blacklist legislation as a new way to battle online infringement. But innovation and free speech advocates know that this initiative will do little to stop infringement online. What it will do is compromise Internet security, inhibit online expression, and slow growth in the technology sector.

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet’s underlying infrastructure. The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to block users’ attempts to reach certain websites’ URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the Internet grows increasingly balkanized.

It gets worse: the blacklist bills’ provisions would give corporations and other private parties new powers to censor foreign websites with court orders that would cut off payment processors and advertisers. Broad immunity provisions (combined with a threat of litigation) would encourage service providers to overblock innocent users or even block websites voluntarily. This gives content companies every incentive to create unofficial blacklists of websites, which service providers would be under pressure to block without regard to the First Amendment.

Service providers would be forced to monitor and police their users’ activities as well, threatening the DMCA safe harbors that have been vital to online innovation over the last decade. SOPA gives the government new powers to go after sites that provide information about tools that might be used to bypass the blacklists – even though these are often the same tools used by democratic activists around the world to bypass Internet censorship mechanisms implemented by authoritarian governments like Iran and China.

Can you imagine the Arab Spring or Occupy without Twitter or Facebook?  SOPA/PIPA would make that a reality.

It’d also allow companies to shut down whistleblowers and governments to hide human rights violations.

The free flow of information is necessary to a functioning society.

Joel’s argument is rather convincing:

It’s like this… a law is passed that threatens to take away the ability to preach. So… all the preachers do not preach for a day. They boycott preaching. You know, to make their point that if a law is passed not to preach, they aren’t going to preach!

Does this make sense to you at all?

If you want to protest SOPA, do something against SOPA, but don’t go dark like they want you too. Find those companies supporting it and stop using their services. Contact your Congressperson. Tell them to stop. You go dark, they win.

I urge you to contact your Congressperson…. often.  Be respectful, but flood their email inboxes and phone lines.  Tell them you don’t want any corporate control over the internet. Tell them to vote NO on SOPA and PIPA.

Write Chris Dodd, head of the MPAA, and tell him that the blackout protests are not “dangerous gimmicks”.

Don’t stand silent in the face of what amounts to corporate totalitarianism.

Go #Misbehavin

Christian – Owner, HomebrewedTheology

Related articles

• SOPA, PIPA Opponents Ready Day of Protest (adweek.com)
• Sites go dark in piracy protest (bbc.co.uk)
• A SOPA/PIPA Blackout Explainer (wired.com)
• Google claims solidarity with 7,000 websites preparing to black out for 24 hours on Wednesday in protest over online piracy bill (dailymail.co.uk)
• SOPA opponents gaining momentum; Wikipedia to join blackout – msnbc.com (redtape.msnbc.msn.com)