Background:
- Lamar Smith expects to return to SOPA drafting discussions in February
- National Post on how not to stop online piracy
Jan 18 Blackouts:
- Wikipedia: Imagine a world without free knowledge
: Blacked out, for all intents and purposes.
: Revised main message, by FT2 and others - Google: Tell Congress please don’t censor the Web!
- 2600.com is unavailable.
- Default Firefox start page to highlight SOPA
- Tumblr plans reprise of “Protect the Net” banners across its tumblogs.
On the WP blackout:
- Why WP is still available (just hard to reach)
- A Blackout extension for anyone running MediaWiki 1.17
- This could be the 1st time in years that en:wp:RecentChanges is readable
Analysis of WP blackout:
- Middle school teacher @ inforgood: why is wp going away for a day
- MSNBC intentionally misses the point: big sites fail to protest
- NY Times front page
- LA Times sees little hope of peace with Hollywood
- CNN front page
- New Statesman opinion essay by WMUK trustee Steve Virgin
Reflection:
WHERE the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,
let my country awake. — R. Tagore
Community comentary:
- Risker, one of three community authors of the en:wp decision to shutter the site on Jan 18th, in #wikimedia-sopa :
“Folks….thank you all for doing such an amazing job to implement the screwiest decision I’ve ever had to write. You have all done well.“ - Some people are lost without WP, mirrors or no mirrors
- “Well, it’s good for people to learn how to get around the blackout of sites, because they’ll need to know how if SOPA passes.“
- I can search Wikipedia through the mobile sights…. Black that out too!!! QUICKLY (01:00 EST)
- As I thought when I read Geoff Brigham’s blog post on SOPA, ‘it’s gotta be bad if it makes the DMCA look good.’
Public commentary:
- @NatLibrariesDay Wikipedia is closed for business today, but your local public library isn’t! ow.ly/8xqFk
Ridiculous! This is why our country is spiraling into debt. Not enough thought is taken into consideration before these bills are even proposed. They are shotgunned through the process and after the fallout settles, we spend countless taxpayer dollars and wasted time that could be applied to fixing real social-economic problems trying to figure out how to repeal these dumb laws in the first place. We already have countless ways around being traced and can encrypt our hard drives to the point where the information is useless in court. If someone really wants to infringe on copyrighted material, the internet will always provide a way no matter how hard the government nannies try to prevent it. This will be new new drug war of this millennium. Another failed government attempt to stop an unstoppable force.
Comment by Kel 01.19.12 @ 7:55 am