Against SOPA

The blackout is in support of the anti-SOPA movement.



An article describes the issue:
For example if you post a link to the story on your Facebook wall. Under SOPA, all of Facebook can be blocked. To avoid this fate, Facebook would be responsible for policing the copyright status of every piece of content its users post. The same happens with search engines, which to avoid being shut down, Google and Bing would be responsible for policing the copyright ownership of every piece of content they index.
That includes Blogger too, of course:  we could easily find ourselves on the wrong side of this, simply because some other blog on Blogger posted something that was copywritten.  How likely is that?  I'd have to say the probability approaches certainty.

5 comments:

DL Sly said...

Honestly? I like the black out look on the site. Which is odd given how much I liked the red background.....but this is really clean and easy to read.

Just my three cents.
heh
0>;~}

Grim said...

You know, years ago there was some reason we went black on the blog for a while. I remember I liked it then, too. We also had a green-and-black scheme for a while (like the shield); but the red is a nice, rich color.

E Hines said...

You'd be directly at risk, too, Grim. All any of us commenters would have to do would to post--or link to--copyrighted material that we'd brought here without all the i's crossed and t's dotted properly.

YouTube, for instance, a source of many of our music links, routinely takes down posts there that have violated YouTube's internal copyright protection requirements. Were I to link to one of those, you'd be in trouble.

I suspect it'd be retroactive, too. Were one of us to link to an apparently legitimate YouTube post, that later ran afoul of SOPA/PIPA, I fear that would reach retroactively to your liability.

And this: someone who demurs from your evil positions deliberately links to copyrighted material without the requisite permissions, solely to run you afoul of SOPA/PIPA. You might actually win this one in court, but you'd be off the air and out a couple of bucks before you'd won.

the red is a nice, rich color

Does that make black richer, since it has all the colors?

Eric Hines

Grim said...

It can be richer or poorer, depending on which system you use.

bthun said...

That includes Blogger too, of course: we could easily find ourselves on the wrong side of this, simply because some other blog on Blogger posted something that was copywritten. How likely is that? I'd have to say the probability approaches certainty.

Which some say* is the point of the exercise.

*Pravda Style Guide preference for citing hard to nail down sources.