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SOPA and PIPA
We've decided that if other sites are going down on Wednesday to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills, all of our sites, including AmeriCymru, will go down for twelve hours, too.
This would affect AmeriCymru from midnight PST, January 18 to midnight PST, January 19.
Ceri and I both think that this is an extremely important issue and that it's important to do whatever we can to protest these bills. If they pass, we and countless other sites could get knocked off the internet with no warning. If we're not big enough to afford lawyers to get back on, that would be the end of us. I believe members of the US Congress wouldn't support these bills if they really knew what they were doing.
I've made a splash page which I'm going to apply to all my sites in place of the home page and anyone who wants it is free to copy and use it. I've attached both a plain text document and an html document to this post. Feel free to pass it on if you want. To use it, save your existing home page with a new name and then upload this pageas index.html and don't forget to take it down when you're done with it.
Here's how they look:
[CONTENT UNAVAILABLE]
We've put this splash page up today in lieu of our regular home page to protest SOPA (stop online piracy act bill in the US Senate) and PIPA (protect IP act bill in the US House of Represenatives). Our regular home page will be up again at midnight tonight.
If these bills pass, someday all you may find at our address is what's above the red line on this page, [CONTENT UNAVAILABLE] and the rest might be blocked. This could also happen to Google, Youtube, the Cheezeburger Network, Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, Netflix, Craigslist, Wikipedia and countless other sites and blogs, many of which wouldn't have the money to fight to get their sites back, no matter how innocent they were.
SOPA and PIPA give big entertainment companies the right to have websites blocked to US users on the basis of their complaint that the site might infringe a copyright. Nothing has to be proven to block the site, it just has to be alleged: guilty until proven innocent. These bills make owners of sites and networks like ours responsible for policing every single word anyone else posts, in fear that someone might post something that would get us blocked.
Intellectual property theft does happen, it is theft and it is harmful but SOPA and PIPA are like trying to prevent shoplifting by removing everyone's hands in advance, just in case they were thinking about it.
Read more about why these bills are harmful and what you can do at http://americancensorship.org/ and http://fightforthefuture.org/ , and please contact your Senators and Representatives and tell them you want them to oppose SOPA and PIPA.
Read these bills for yourself to see what they're really about:
SOPA at: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3261:
