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My journal over at Dreamwidth is now back to normal. I'm glad to be back. :)
So, did protesting against SOPA/PIPA in this way work? Well, I'm sure that me blacking out my journal probably had very little impact in the scheme of things; for the most part I'd be preaching to the choir. (In fact, the only real reason I did it was because I know that I've been popular recently because of my Greasemonkey script to add a Preview button to the new LiveJournal comment form. If it hadn't been for that, I probably wouldn't have done it.)
But it wasn't just me. Many other people and companies also protested against SOPA and PIPA by blacking out their websites. Of these, the site with the most influence was undoubtedly Wikipedia. While Google did put up information about the bills and encourage people to write, they didn't go black, nor should they have done. Wikipedia did go black (although there were deliberate workarounds for emergency access), and reading Twitter it was very easy to see just how much influence Wikipedia had on the day's events (though I disagree that it was 'hilarious' to see the reactions).
But did all the blacking out achieve anything? Yes, it did - very much so, in fact. Several sponsors of the bills dropped their support, and as of right now the support and oppose figures stand at 67 and 71 respectively, which is a vast improvement over the earlier figures of 80 and 31 (according to a comment on Reddit).
For those who can view videos, I also found this interview with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian to be good viewing.
The fight isn't quite over yet, because much of the opposition is in regard to SOPA (the House bill) rather than PIPA (the Senate bill). PIPA is almost as dangerous as SOPA, with little difference in regard to how it works, as I understand it. That said, the awareness built up from this massive campaign has done a *lot* for us, and it will probably make things easier.
I'm glad I was able to play a part in that, even if my own individual contribution was only a drop in the ocean.
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[posted to Dreamwidth only]
You may have noticed yesterday that this journal had been set to Deleted. If you went to the journal directly, or to the profile, you'd have seen the custom message I set up: Blacking out this journal for 24 hours to raise awareness of SOPA (which is still a threat; see bit.ly/xQ3DGZ for why) and PIPA (which has always been a threat). See soph.livejournal.com for more information. Fear not - nothing was lost. As the message says, I was blacking it out for a cause - raising awareness of SOPA and PIPA, which are both dangerous bills with the power to radically change the Internet for the worse. I kept my LJ up for a few different reasons, which I outlined in a public post there. I didn't like posting to only one service, but I felt it important. My intention was to repost it on DW after the blackout, and this is what I'm doing with this post. (Which is not being crossposted because then people on LJ would see it twice.) I'll make another post after this one regarding the current situation, which will be crossposted. My LJ post during the blackout:[this is a public post]
Today, I've blacked out my journal over at Dreamwidth for 24 hours in order to raise awareness of SOPA/PIPA, alongside many other websites, including Wikipedia.
Please note: SOPA is still a threat, despite the news reports recently that it was shelved indefinitely. (Lamar Smith plans to resume SOPA's markup in February.)
I'm only doing this on DW, for two reasons:
a) DW is now my primary home. Most people are watching me there, as far as I know, and keeping LJ up allows me to make posts like this one (which I'll repost to DW after the blackout);
b) LJ doesn't have any way to specify *why* a journal was 'deleted'. This would mean that people might worry about me.
Why am I doing this, even though I'm located in the UK and the bill is a US one? Because most of the sites I use on the Internet are based in the US.
( But Sophie, the bill only affects sites overseas! (Answer: No, it doesn't.) )
(TL;DR: A "site dedicated to theft of US property" is one located in the US and where the owner(s) have taken 'deliberate actions' to avoid confirming 'a high probability' of copyright infringement. The 'deliberate actions' are left undefined, as is what 'a high probability' means, and this is what makes the bill so dangerous.)
So what happens to a 'site dedicated to theft of US property'? Namely, a complete cutoff from anything that could provide financial support to that site - payment merchants such as PayPal or 2Checkout would be forced to deny payments to the site from its members/subscribers, and advertising networks would be forced to deny the site any ads.
Combine the unspecific nature of the bill with the financial cutoff penalty, and you have a perfect recipe for governmental censorship. And no, of course the government wouldn't use it to shut down YouTube, but they wouldn't need to. Services like YouTube simply cannot afford to fall foul of a law like this, and if the bill passed, it would give the government a *reason* to shut YouTube down. That's all they need, because with the threat of that hanging in the air, they could ask YouTube to do damn well anything and they'd have to comply. Blackmail, in other words.
I'll probably write more on this topic later, but for now, I hope I've given a good explanation of why this would be bad for the Internet as a whole, and why I've chosen to black out my journal for the day.
[edit 9:49pm GMT: For people in the UK, here's a petition on direct.gov calling on the UK government to condemn SOPA and PIPA: https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/26143 ]
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