This
protest was immensely successful
January
18, 2012:
Surprisingly,
Lamar Smith (R-Tx) favored this bill as he partnered with B. Obama - a bill that promised to end free speech on the web. Even more surprising, the conservative world was represented by [only] Midknight Review and O’Reilly. Both sites shut down
for the day. No other conservative
blogs participated in the strike. Somewhat discouraging. I would have thought the Right Wing
would have been all over this breach of free speech. Not the case.
Will I, now, return to the
Democrat Party? Don’t be silly - but
know this, I intend on being a lot less
nasty when referencing many of the liberal bloggospher. Anyway,
I lost traffic. It took 6 days to
return to my daily averages, but it was
worth the effort.
 |
| If SOPA had passed, one day, this blog could have been shut down for some innocent infraction of the rules, never to heard from again. Of course, this old guy is already set up to start blogging again, immediately, but I would have lost all my audience until and unless they could search and find me again. I have been shut down once, two years ago. |
As far
as Lamar Smith is concerned, he is
forever on my hit list. Putting corporate profits at the head of the line
for the sake of free speech considerations, is as disgusting a
proposition as I know - and it was a "constitutionalist Republican"
that spear headed the push for this legislation. This old goat needs
to be gone. Understand that "S-T-O-P" is translated into
"Stop Online Piracy Act." Under the guise of
protecting intellectual property, for which we already have a host of
laws, the Dark Side had intended to take control of speech on the web.
You ask, "If this is
about copyright law, how does that include and limit free speech?"
The
answer will sound excruciatingly obvious when we share it with you.
Here it is: someone, anyone, working for a controlling
agency, can shut down a website, declaring that it ran copyright
material on its digital pages. The blog would be shutdown without legal
recourse and the owner(s) of that blog would be out of business with no possibility
of appeal.
How did the strike work (as in "function") ? Speaking for myself, I stop running commentary, and carried a very involved explanation of the threat to the internet, and why I was not posting. Readers were given links to register their protest of this PIPA bill and "protest" they did. It was announced the very next day, that congress had decided not to consider this bill, anytime soon.
Here's a list of sites that have provided informational links explaining SOPA's issues, or will go partially or completely dark sometime today, in hopes to raise awareness by its users, exhorting them to action.
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