From the same band that brought us “Fight for Your Right” comes many great themes for opposing SOPA.
In a post-SOPA world images and music with questionable copyrights will be tickets for take downs, financial seizure, and other under handed attacks on popular websites.
You think the legal ho-ha over patents is extremely petty and wasteful? Picture how bad the internet will be when user posted content can get your entire organization shut down instantly?
Here’s an example, say I decide to post something on our blog that’s not SOPA-safe. The competition takes note of it, and the instant I say something the competition doesn’t like, they complain about the post, our DNS is yanked, our accounts are frozen, and THEN we get the complaint to remove the content.
Yeah that’s not going to work, look at Germany if you want to see an example of what a SOPA-like environment is like.
Here’s a SOPA-like example:
Retired, Computerless Woman, forced by courts to pay fine for pirating hooligan movie
Even little things, like a picture of an awesome band, and a ~10 sec clip of their music would become ‘frightening’ if SOPA passed. Such uses are fine right now as we’d find out right away if a rights holder cares, and we’d take it down without a fuss. Post SOPA would be completely different, and fear of take-downs would absolutely kill user-submissions because each post would need to be checked for violations.
Tom’s Hardware also posted today with similar concerns to what we have in regards to immoral and unwarranted take-downs of sites over user-generated content. I really do like the fact that they had no qualms explaining exactly how pirates will work around SOPA DNS blocks, how SOPA won’t be effective at it’s main purpose, and is only going to be abused.
The names of companies opposed to SOPA is huge and growing, with supporters like GoDaddy changing it’s stance as the public backlash forces them to step back from a supporting role. In fact today GoDaddy even took the time to share a copy of the remaining supports of the bill, with it’s name missing from the list.
This has even more people freaking out about GoDaddy because:
Soaking your neighbours in kerosene has never been the wisest way to try and douse your own fire…
It’s no wonder GoDaddy reacted to the anti-SOPA movement; One report had pegged the losses for GoDaddy at over 70,000 domains in a single day last week, and today (Dec 29th) is the official ‘boycott GoDaddy’ day over on Reddit.
Imgur also stepped up and announced that they are working on leaving GoDaddy as well, but there’s speculation over how people would react if GoDaddy was to ‘make good’ on it’s position by actually supporting the anti-SOPA movement instead of merely dropping it’s support for the bill.
Only time will tell but I really am starting to worry about all the folks saying that SOPA is ‘likely’ to pass!? That just seems so absurd to me, but experts are hard to ignore, and I’m no political watch dog.
UPDATE: Okay I knew I was breaking the cardinal rule of auto-play and I knew it was for a good cause, but I couldn’t let it stick for more than a day. The clip’s still there you just have to hit play. 