Is your business participating in the Internet Blackout Jan. 18th? For an easy way to do so see www. http://sopablackout.org/ 

The blackout is to, as you may have guessed, protest SOPA/PIPA, some nasty bits of legislation appearing before our esteemed congress. 

I’m posting here because these bills, if passed as written, could really hurt both small business (no inexpensive way to dispute claims against them) and social media sites (responsible for what users post before they even see it). On a grander scale it could really make the US net a lame, dull, place, stifling innovation and causing companies to go offshore, or at the least, move their hosting elsewhere. 

Curious to see which business participate. Reddit is of course on board, sounds like Wikipedia and Google will be as well. For  the stance of people smarter than me just take a peak at the signatures on http://engineadvocacy.org/sopaletter/ 

@juleswebb Great stuff, keep it up. 

Everyone else… bemused at the lack of interest in this. 

@mike-stelzner
Curious, looks like every second go it works. Try http://sopablackout.org/ ?

 @robpeck I agree it’s a bit bewildering about the lack of interest in this.

I know for myself, the potential far reaching ramifications of these bills didn’t become clear until I read the below article.

The Problem with SOPA (And How To Stop It) http://www.copyblogger.com/sopa/

For me it’s not so much a lack of interest as it feels SO overwhelming and outlandish that it can’t possibly happen. And/or like something you wish if you just ignore it maybe it will go away. It also scares me honestly.

Anyway the above article is extremely thorough, extremely readable and comes from Copyblogger, a trusted source. Reading it (along with a lot of the comments) helped my understanding tremendously — thought it would be useful here.

Cheers,
Stef

Weird, maybe the censorship has begun Text is 

An open letter 
to Washington

We’ve all had the good fortune to found Internet companies and nonprofits in a regulatory climate that promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, the creation of content and free expression online.

However, we’re worried that the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy — which started out as well-meaning efforts to control piracy online — will undermine that framework.

These two pieces of legislation threaten to:

• Require web services, like the ones we helped found, to monitor what users link to, or upload. This would have a chilling effect on innovation;
• Deny website owners the right to due process of law;
• Give the U.S. Government the power to censor the web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran; and
• Undermine security online by changing the basic structure of the Internet.

We urge Congress to think hard before changing the regulation that underpins the Internet. Let’s not deny the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders the same opportunities that we all had.

• Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
• Mitchell Baker, co-founder of Mozilla Firefox
• Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
• Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square
• Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch
• David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!
• Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
• Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post
• Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube
• Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and co-founder of Alexa Internet
• Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal
• Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist
• Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
• Biz Stone, co-founder of Obvious and Twitter
• Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation
• Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter
• Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!

To help protect Internet innovation please visit: engineadvocacy.com/voice

Thanks for this information, I had no idea. Will SME be offline, too? @mike-stelzner