SOPA and PIPA

[Haruo]

Wikipedia's shutting down tomorrow. Anybody else planning anything?

[Tim Bonney]

[David Flick]

[Ed Pettibone]

[Haruo]

Ed, have you tried getting involved in the discussion of anything you've found questionable, or editing anything where you knew you could do better?

[Tim Bonney]

I've honestly not paid enough attention to this issue. Can someone explain, in a nutshell, what the bill is about and what the objections are about.

[Ed Pettibone]

[jeremy_shoulta]

Here is some information provided by Google:



It's hard to find a video or link supporting SOPA, but here's a page which lists major companies who that have thrown their support behind SOPA:

[Haruo]

[Haruo]

For more on what the issue is about, from the English Wikipedia board's point of view, go to and click on the links. Today, that's all that's there.

[Tim Bonney]

Thanks! That helps. I honestly don't know what to think.

[Haruo]

It's not just Wikipedia. It's (click on the black thing for their take on it), and potentially it's all of us. And little guys like Bruce will be in a lot worse position to fight it or to accommodate it than the big outfits like Wikimedia and Google.com that have enough budget to put some into the struggle to keep Congress from acting like it so often does and pretending dollars are people.

[Tim Bonney]

[Haruo]

They're mostly old people, and they're mostly beholden to vested interests that see the downside to free speech. (not enough $$$)

Lolcats (the I Can Has Cheezburger network) is another site that is down today, but at least it has generated a good song (though the tune is pirated in the terms of the SOPA writers):



BTW the UMC's advice to music ministers is, "use YouTube to help your choir learn new tunes". (There's more to it than that, but that's the beginning of some good advice.) That would mostly go away under SOPA and PIPA, and a whole lot of trees would be sacrificed to the books that would be needed to fill the gap.

[Ed Pettibone]

[Tim Bonney]

Well, it sounds like there are good reasons for wikipedia, Google, OpenDNS, and others to be concerned.

[Haruo]