STOP SOPA

[uknomeprk]

Tomorrow, January 18th, 2012, will be the largest internet protest in history. Thousands of sites across the internet, including some of the biggest in the world, will be blacking out and directing people to contact Congress to kill the web censorship bill, SOPA and PIPA. We want to get you involved.

Join us on the historic day by blacking out your site. Copy the code below and paste it into the header of your theme (Wordpress users: use the SOPA Strike plugin) to black your site out in protest of SOPA/PIPA. It will activate automatically on Jan. 18th, displaying this page and directing visitors to contact Congress, and will deactivate at the end of the day.

<script type="text/javascript">var a=new Date,b=a.getHours()+a.getTimezoneOffset()/60;if(18==a.getDate()&&0==a.getMonth()&&2012==a.getFullYear()&&13<=b&&24>=b)window.location="http://sopastrike.com/strike";</script>In just 7 days, the Senate will vote on forever altering the free and open internet by instituting a new regime of extra-judicial, corporate-led website takedowns. This is a fundamental fight about who has power in society -- the people with the means to communicate freely or the governments and corporations that feel threatened.

For the full state of play on the censorship bills, take a look at this infographic we've put together. Click here. The clock is ticking, and we're still 35 senators short of the number we need to kill the bill.

[antus]

Most (but not all) the members here are Aussies, and were not big enough to be in the public eye so I opted not to black out this site. But SOPA/PIPA are poorly written laws that will not have the effect on piracy that are intended, and instead will set up any site to be censored without proper or fair process. This is very dangerous precedent to set. Despite being an American law, sites world wide - even those hosted in Australia like we are (at the moment and in the forseeable future at least) can be affected. We are in .net so our domain would have been able to be taken (although that has been dropped from sopa due to public protest ), but we could still be blocked at the search engine and ISP level. Also, the way the industries who are pushing this bill work, its likely once they have a law in their favour anywhere in the world, they will use that as amunition to say a precedent has been set so other countries should follow. All it would take is a competing site to create a user account here, post a link to copyrighted material, or attach something like a copyrighted photo, then report us before any of the mods or admins see it and remove it (we do our best to stay legal), and too bad.. were done for. Same applys to any web site. If you are in the USA call up or write to you local government representatives and tell them you object. It seems the free world is rapidly loosing their freedom, and it must be opposed! Good luck to all, the time to act is now!