Wikipedia Blackout Anti-SOPA Initiative

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The English Wikipedia is currently down for 24 hours to protest against SOPA:

Why is Wikipedia blacked-out?
Wikipedia is protesting against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out the English Wikipedia for 24 hours, beginning at midnight January 18, Eastern Time. Readers who come to English Wikipedia during the blackout will not be able to read the encyclopedia. Instead, you will see messages intended to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA, encouraging you to share your views with your representatives, and with each other on social media.
What are SOPA and PIPA?
SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the "Stop Online Piracy Act," and PIPA is an acronym for the "Protect IP Act." ("IP" stands for "intellectual property.") In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet. Detailed information about these bills can be found in the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia, which are available during the blackout. GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process: SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for the public interest in the digital realm, has summarized why these bills are simply unacceptable in a world that values an open, secure, and free Internet.
Why is the blackout happening?
Wikipedians have chosen to black out the English Wikipedia for the first time ever, because we are concerned that SOPA and PIPA will severely inhibit people's access to online information. This is not a problem that will solely affect people in the United States: it will affect everyone around the world.
Why? SOPA and PIPA are badly drafted legislation that won't be effective at their stated goal (to stop copyright infringement), and will cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. And, SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression.

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http://mashable.com/2012/01/20/sopa-is-dead-smith-pulls-bill/

Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, said on Friday that he is pulling the bill “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”
“I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy,” Smith (R-Texas) said. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”
 
I hope people will still be watching that bill and make sure it won't get signed into law.

US (and world!) economy might make a big nosedive if the US Internet turns into a clone of the Great Firewall of China.

We'd probably see companies going out of business in droves, including the ones who were the most vocal advocates for that bill.

There's another danger on the horizon that is part of the SOPA initiative: Windows 8 with its UEFI secure boot, which effectively locks out alternative operating systems like Linux. It might become difficult to obtain hardware w/o UEFI in some years. Then we'll be back to the walled gardens of the 1980ies ... thanks to Apple and Microsoft. Both companies have been trying for years to allow only signed software on their operating systems ... if there's a hardware mechanism to lock out independent software (and documents, even!), people will have a hard time publishing their independent works.

The SOPA initiative for the Internet would have even broader consequences, namely locking down large parts of the Internet to proprietary realms. The movie and music industry would be pleased of course, but as soon as consumption would reach saturated levels, those companies would begin to go out of business.

The only solution would be to stay clear of UEFI or TPM enabled hardware (if that isn't outlawed one day).

If all else fails, there's still the option to create an independent subnet in the US that interfaces to the real Internet ... like some people in China or Iran are doing. But it doesn't have to get that far.
 
Furthermore, SOPA and PIPA are deeply unnecessary, b/c copyright legislation already exists and is enforced. There are plenty of law firms thriving on that. File sharing is already monitored at a large scale, and it is actually pretty easy to catch every single file sharer there is that is sharing files illegally. I've actually been working in that field for one and a half years, so I know what's possible. So those proposed laws are pots with handles inside ... they're not necessary and make things worse for everybody, further contributing to the destruction of the free Internet.
 
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