Tony’s Rants to ‘go dark’ on January 18 to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA)
January 17th, 2012
Protect the Internet from censorship - Contact Senators and Congressman and urge them to vote against SOPA / PIPA!
Dueling bills backed by President Barack Obama, Senator Harry Reid and others would lead to Internet censorship at the whim of the entertainment industry, the government and judges. To protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), Tony’s Rants will join thousands of other websites and ‘go dark’ on January 18.
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) is sponsoring PIPA in the Senate and Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) is carrying SOPA in the House of Representatives. The bills are backed by Hollywood and big media ostensibly as a way to stop online piracy and protect copyrights. They are however bad ideas that could lead to the censorship of websites like Tony’s Rants.
These ineffective and shortsighted bills would place undue burdens on websites and Internet providers. Any company with an intellectual copyright claim could for example force Google to remove links to an accused site, prevent credit card companies from processing payments to the accused site, and much more. This could all be done without any legal proceedings at all.
Tony’s Rants takes great care to respect and honor other’s property in written, audio or visual form and we are proud of our efforts to never take liberty with someone else’s hard work. However, under SOPA / PIPA, our site could be brought down simply if someone posted a comment that contained copyrighted text or linked to a site that hosted copyrighted material.
This simply is unacceptable. Tony’s Rants will be joining other sites like Wikipedia, Tucows, and Reddit in the blackout to take place tomorrow.
Please watch the video below for more information and contact your Senators and Congressman and urge them to vote against SOPA / PIPA. You can also learn more about the dangers of SOPA / PIPA via this infographic and at the links below the video.
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
Watch the video · American Censorship page · View the Infographic
Read SOPA on OpenCongress · Read PIPA on OpenCongress
Hi Tony,
I think Google offers a good alternative:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/dont-censor-web.html
Yesterday’s protest was very successful both Senator Udall’s and Bennet’s website were unavailable yesterday when I followed the links from Wikipedia. I was able to get through to Congressman Polis’s website.
President Obama hasn’t come out in support of these measures as far as I can tell. Could you provide some backup to your statement of President Obama’s support for them? He does get support from Hollywood, but he also gets support from Silicon Valley, so two of his big supporters fall on opposite sides of the issue.
Here is a link to information that President Obama has come out as not supporting these initiatives:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/18/sopa-obama-donors-hollywood-silicon-valley_n_1213159.html
I like the video you have posted.
It looks like Harry Reid has smartly decided that PIPA may not be such a good idea after all. Here is a link to some information along those lines:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120113/15120617405/pipas-own-sponsors-backing-off-bill-ask-senate-to-hold-off-voting.shtml
Thanks,
Andrew