A number of websites including Wikipedia are as protest of the SOPA.
Just wondering if anyone has given any thought to this.
What is SOPA?
It’s the Stop Online Piracy Act, introduced last year by U.S. Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Texas), the chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary. It included a controversial provision that would have required the blocking of the domain names of foreign rogue websites from resolving.
However, as of Friday, Smith has already removed the DNS blocking provision from the bill.
[bump]
I’m guessing the answer is no, but I’m still interested if TPTB gave any thought to this.
Thanks
The mods and admins never discussed it, and if it was ever considered by Ed Zotti or anyone at Creative Loafing, we didn’t hear about it. I assume it wasn’t.
Political activism is unseemly for this board, and they don’t really have a dog in the fight anyway.
Certainly it’s a much more august presence on the internet than rabble like Wikipedia and Google. The SDMB must not compromise its dignity.
And what’s that supposed to mean?
Do you think you know what Creative Loafing’s interests really amount to with this issue? Or if the company is interested in taking public stands like this on legislation?
I suppose it is supposed to mean that I was amused by the pomposity of a comment suggesting that it is somehow beneath the dignity of an internet message board to gasp engage in vulgar politicking.
As for what Creative Loafing’s interests are, I don’t know, I didn’t even know the name until now but I see they publish alternative weeklies or write content for them or something. I suspect even they don’t know their interests on an issue like this, unless their house lawyers are pretty sharp. But I have at least a faint suspicion that there is probably something to the concerns of larger and wealthier web presences who are concerned about the chilling effects of this legislation on internet entities whose content is produced by the general public.
Well, TPTB wouldn’t want to do it next week, or something like that. If you’re going to be part of the blackout day, you want to do it on the same day as everyone else. If Wikipedia is down, and I try to update a program at TUCOWS and its down, and I try to browse the SDMB and its down. Well, a lesser person might dissolve into a puddle of ooze. But some people might get really angry at Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Texas), and the embarrassment might make the next such bill be written more carefully.
I’m sorry, but doesn’t post #3 negate the need for this blackout?
He’s got a safe seat in Sugarland, Texas. This isn’t going to kill his career.
I’m not even sure what this is supposed to mean. There are several thousand bills introduced in Congress every year and no one has ever held them to the standard of being written “carefully” upon introduction.
Introduction of legislation is only the first step in the process and most legislation goes through extensive rewriting and even then only a small handful of them ever come close to getting enacted.
This bill doesn’t have a chance of being enacted in its current form, and as I noted before, the DNS blocking provision has already been taken out.
Before doing something like this, Creative Loafing would have to be pretty damn sure that this is something it wants to show its hand in, and it’s not even all that clear as an issue as, say, an issue like net neutrality.
Google obviously has a dog in this fight (or, it had, anyway), and it’s also a huge company with an army of lobbyists. It’s not clear to me what the stakes would be for a company like Creative Loafing. And it’s not even really all that clear what its interest *should *be from what I can tell. Why should they jump on this bandwagon?
Oh, I wasn’t even aware that provision applied to the SDMB; I had assumed the servers for this place were in the United States since it seems to be Chicago-based.
But no, the (rather unlikely) possibility that the straightdope.com domain could be blocked isn’t the reason why so many web entities that host user-generated content are worried about this. The blocking of some foreign internet traffic sounds scary, since it’s what the Great Firewall of China does, alongside other similar technologies in places like North Korea, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. It’s the other provisions of the bill that are really frightening.
OK, Thanks 
[insert witty remark]
It’s Spanish for “soup”.
I thought it was Italian for “soap”.
I for one am disgusted by this lack of sensitivity to both the spanish and italian speaking peoples of this board and this world.
You can’t choose to be sensitive when it suits you. You must be diligent at all times. And being PC on this board is one of the strategic objectives of TPTB (if it’s not, it should be)
reported.
Don’t be too sure. Some of the right-wingers are as angry as anybody else, and Redstate in particular is pushing the idea of a primary challenge to him.
I’d support the SD going dark tomorrow, although it’s probably too late to set it up.
I for one am typing with my eyes shut tomorrow to show my support.