From Ars Technica
January 18, 2012
Today is SOPA Resistance Day at Ars. Sites across the ‘Net, from reddit to the Internet Archive, from Wikipedia to Google, are protesting the excesses of the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA remains a flawed bill that treats piracy as an existential threat to the US economy and to a sacred class of rightsholders””and in doing so loses all perspective on appropriate remedies. The discussion is absolutely unbalanced.
Many sites have chosen to go dark (i.e., offline) today, a stance we respect””but it’s not the right path for us. Ars Technica has, for 14 years, tried to be an information resource, and the most appropriate response from Ars is to provide even more information on the legislation, how you can fight it, and what’s really at stake.
Our normal publishing schedule has been frozen in carbonite. For a limited time, we’re turning our attention to SOPA and its Senate cousin, the PROTECT IP Act. What remains in each bill after the managers’ amendments and the removal of DNS blocking? What would we like to see in a vastly improved SOPA 2.0? Is there a way forward?
Most importantly, what can you do to make your voice heard? Writing a boring note to your Senator won’t get the job done. So we’re going to show you our tips on really ruffling feathers en masse. Some people are already celebrating the death of SOPA, but we all know this is far, far from over.
We’ll be covering all these stories and more throughout the day, and we’ll be documenting the protests and the responses to them. Come back in the morning for the first installment of our Fighting Back Guide.
A few words of sanity
Piracy is an emotional issue, but it’s important to note what it is not: a war between the “creators” and the “technologists.” Ars Technica lives or dies by our content and its copyright. So does publisher Tim O’Reilly. So does musician Peter Gabriel. Yet all of us oppose SOPA. It’s time for supporters of SOPA and SOPA-like legislation to drop the conveniently facile caricatures they have of their opponents. Millions of us believe in intellectual property as a fair concept that can have an important place in our society. And for a subset of us, it’s our intellectual property that’s at risk anyway.
There’s room to build a reasonable consensus for dealing with the “worst of the worst” online. But that means going back to the drawing board and bringing the tech community and Internet users to the table before legislation is drafted. Creating a sudden “emergency” around the issue and using only the perspective of the biggest rightsholders as a starting point is no way to legislate on key Internet issues””and band-aid patches to such a flawed approach aren’t going to fix that.
SOPA needs to be stopped””and then we can start the hyperbole-free conversation that the content industries and the White House both say they want.
We challenge the White House, the Congress, and all supporters of SOPA: engage with us and with the Internet community on assessing the real threat of piracy and the appropriate response to it. This isn’t a PR stunt. Ars Technica has the longest track record online of taking these matters seriously and listening to both sides. We can save you a lot of time by pointing out the areas in which your failure is all but assured””and point the way forward on areas where we can find common ground. We’ll have more later today on ways to move forward with a strategy that isn’t dead before you think of it. Meanwhile, the smartest, most tech savvy people on the Internet will be here, waiting for your next move.