Stop SOPA Protest

I took tesuji.org down for 24 hours and replaced everything, including any images served, with this page/image to take part in the protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act. Instead of being weaksauce about it and put up some javascript over the usual content and display an overlay to cover it up, I used Apache's mod_rewrite to internally redirect every request and serve only the Stop SOPA page or image (if an image was requested). Everything's back to normal now but I thought I'd put up a page of links about it.

What is this stuff?

SOPA's Wikipedia article
PIPA's Wikipedia article
An infographic about SOPA.
A SOPA and PIPA timeline. (Very good list of supporters/retractors)
SOPA's author, Representative Lamar Smith

The protest

Wikipedia's press release announcing the blackout on January 16
MPAA Issues a statement calling the so-called "blackout" [is] yet another gimmick
Lamar Smith thinks it's a publicity stunt
Senator of Vermont, Patrick Leahy, doesn't know why
Paul Levinson thinks shutting down is wrong
More on the Anti-Anti-SOPA people
Metatalk's story about Web Sheriff and SOPA/PIPA
Google announces that they're slowing their bots down to reduce the blackout impacts on search rankings.
Photos of SOPA protests in New York City
Some of the bigger sites that participated in the protest

The aftermath

Google's End Piracy, Not Liberty page, includes a PDF of Anti-SOPA support
4.5 Million Google's petition (in less than a day's time)
No surprise, Rupert Murdoch is not a fan
But Zuckerberg says he's anti-SOPA
Support for SOPA weakens (mostly Republicans)
And many on the right jump ship, but Reid and Smith still say they're pushing the repective bills (PIPA and SOPA) to vote.
Some funny reactions to the Wikipedia blackout on twitter.
According to Lamar Smith, Google and Wikipedia "have generated enormous profits from illegal websites that sell stolen intellectual property"
The MPAA's Chris Dodd threatens politicians who back off the bill that the MPAA would stop making them rich with campaign contributions

UPDATE:

PIPA dropped indefinitely, SOPA dropped indefinitely, CNN link, Politico, Pnosker

Also make sure to visit http://americancensorship.org/ and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Filed under: Computers
1/19/2012

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