Blackout for SOPA/PIPA
Last week, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was given a smackdown, at least for a while. Congress delayed making SOPA law until “outstanding concerns” have been ironed out. In fact, the vote has been taken off the floor. Many folks are happy about this delay, and Darrell Issa (R-CA) has remarked that there has been so much blowback that legislators may want to leave it alone.
But hang on… We still have PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act) to worry about next.
PIPA, twin legislation to SOPA, which covers much of the same ground but in a different way, threatens to change the Internet as we know it. A vote is scheduled for January 24, and if that bill passes, we could be open for censorship the like the Internet has never seen. Our free and open society, built by millions of users could come crashing down in legislation that wants to make sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr into police squads, monitoring what we put up online. Internet providers will have to shut down sites where they feel illegal file sharing is happening, and hold Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines responsible for disallowing those results in their indexes. Either legislation will limit the open creativity and threaten our First Amendment rights. We can’t let this happen!
To protest SOPA and PIPA, a blackout is scheduled for tomorrow, Wednesday, January 18. Some of the biggest sites online are planning to blackout, too, like Wikipedia, reddit, Mozilla, Boing Boing, and even the Fail Blog of the “Cheezeburger” network. More sites are climbing on the bandwagon as I type.
Matt McGee of Search Engine Land even wrote a post yesterday about blacking out your website, if you want to participate, without screwing up your SEO. And Pierre Far of Google shared several tips about blacking out your site on Google Plus. He suggests using a 503 status code, which is a temporarily offline return code for search spiders, for every page you want to blackout.
If your site is on WordPress, you can get a plugin that will temporarily return this 503 here. Or, if you just want to display your aversion to the legislation, you can get a plugin that displays a black band on your site that simply says, “Stop SOPA.” You can see it in the upper right-hand corner of this blog. Get the Stop SOPA ribbon plugin here.
Whatever you decide to do, you should pay attention to PIPA, and even though SOPA is off the floor for now, we need to keep a close eye to make sure it never comes back. Don’t let OUR Internet be destroyed by a bunch of politicians that are caving to big business.
As a writer myself, no, I absolutely DO NOT like plagiarism and piracy, but it’s bound to happen with or without these laws in place. We already have laws for that, which were enforced on sites like Napster way back when. U. S. laws won’t stop it. What don’t they get about the Internet being a GLOBAL community?
The only thing they will do with either of these ridiculous laws is to take one more of our freedom. I don’t know about you, but I can’t handle any more of those going away. Can you? This is America! Or, at least, it’s supposed to be.
EXTRA (7:30 p.m.): Not convinced? Read this: Why SOPA Is Dangerous by Chris Heald
