For those of you living in a complete bubble, today is the day the Web community is banding together to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills up for debate in Congress next week.
http://americancensorship.org/I can't emphasize enough how awful these bills are. Supposedly intended to protect companies from having their intellectual property stolen (that is, unauthorized use of copyrighted material), they are actually incredibly poorly and broadly written (shocker). They will give an amazing amount of power to the copyright holders to SHUT DOWN any site that they even *suspect* of violating their copyright - AND ANY SITES ASSOCIATED WITH THAT SITE.
Part of a university? If a student puts up something they aren't supposed to, SOPA can shut down the whole university's web site. The whole .edu, every student's site, every professor's site, everything.
Use a common hosting/publishing service like Squarespace or Weebly? (I do. So does CakeWrecks, fwiw.) If *any* user of those services does something crappy (or has a user who posts a copyright-violating comment on a blog post), EVERY site that uses that service will be shut down.
(Any random person posts copyrighted crap on a Knot message board? Bye bye, Knot!)
Please take just a few minutes today to send an email to your Representative and Senators telling them you are opposed to these bills.
http://americancensorship.org/ has a mechanism for you to do this automatically, or you can find your Representative and Senators online:
Reps:
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtmlSenators:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfmThanks, guys! And yes, I'll be all over Facebook and Twitter with this today, too.
