Tucows.com just published a post its site entitled “Why We Don’t Like SOPA and promises to follow Reddit lead and blackout its site on January 18th
The story is written by Elliot Noss the CEO of Tucows.com
Tucows.com is the 3rd largest registrar in the world with almost 9 Million domains under management according to registrarStats.com
We congratulate Tucows for taking a strong stance on this and joining the black out which will cost them a day of revenue.
Here is the full post:
“”The proposed SOPA (and equally odious “Protect IP Act“) legislation is fundamentally flawed in how it works and the damage it is likely to do to the Internet, which has been the greatest platform for innovation the world has ever seen.”
“For that reason we will be joining the blackout organized by our friends at Reddit by blacking out the Tucows Software Download site on January 18th from 8am to 8pm EST (1300-0100 UTC).”
“The Internet is a global creature. A “Made in the USA” solution will no more work to stop the problems talked of than would one made in any other single nation state. Worse, the US has been at the forefront of ensuring that the Internet has remained free and a platform for innovation for the last fifteen years. With SOPA, or ProtectIP, that leadership will effectively end and Syria, China, Iran and others will not only use the US as a role model, they will also use these actions as further evidence of US control of the Internet and justification for trying to turn it over to the UN/ITU. This is best described by Susan Crawford.”
“Worse, the legislation itself is fundamentally corrupt. It is bought and paid for by big media, trying vainly to protect anachronistic business models. This has been demonstrated clearly in all of the hearings and the very conduct of the debate. Listening to how deeply uninformed those being asked to legislate this issue are has been nothing short of scary. Watching how support and opposition has lined up has been disheartening. This is the worst example of the kind of fundamental corruption that is at the heart of the US political system currently and is well defined by Professor Larry Lessig. If you have ten minutes please watch this video on the subject.”
“If you have an hour please watch this one.”
“The Internet is not a corpus, it is not a thing. It is a series of protocols, which are really agreements on how computers will behave when connected to the Internet. Treating the Internet like a thing to be legislated and controlled is as ill-conceived as treating “Intellectual Property” like physical property and leads to even greater perversions. ”
“If governments squeeze too tightly, the Internet as we know it will simply get up and walk away. It will fracture and split with a “clean” Internet and a much larger Darknet. than there is today, but not one used mainly for file sharing. Instead the Darknet will become the real Internet. Brands will sell things and Media will offer content on the “Cleannet”, but the Darknet will be where ideas are shared, plans are made, memes are propagated and where most of the cool people, including most of our children, will be.
Prohibitions have never worked to change behaviours. They simply make people who fear things feel good and create a new mini-industry for fear mongers to make money off of.
They do not change behaviours.””
There’s a countdown to the Blackout here http://vrsry.com/sopa
Two frightening pieces of controversial legislation, SOPA and The NDAA only go to further stifle our Constitutional Rights without the approval of the Americans, just as the Patriot Act was adopted WITHOUT public approval or vote just weeks after the events of 9/11. A mere 3 criminal charges of terrorism a year are attributed to this act, which is mainly used for no-knock raids leading to drug-related arrests without proper cause for search and seizure. The laws are simply a means to spy on our own citizens and to detain and censor public opinion without trial or a right to council. You can read much more about living in this Orwellian society of fear and see my visual response to these measures on my artist’s blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/09/living-in-society-of-fear-ten-years.html
Great job by Tucows. Well written piece.
He’s pretty much on the mark.
We should not conclude that such poor legislation is deriving out of malice.
But it’s a fair comment to say it’s deriving out of ignorance.
If these folks really wanted to put a stop to piracy, there are more effective ways to do it. Perhaps they just do not have the technical knowledge to understand what they are dealing with. Digital == copying. And it can travel over any medium. In order to travel long distances across a medium, the bits get copied.
There is really no such thing as “streaming”. The bits are in a buffer. They are copies. And they can be saved.
It’s like sending a message via Morse code. The operator on the receiving end copies down the message. Maybe he discards the paper after he relays the message to the recipient. But he ha still made a copy. There is no way to stop that.
People could do file transfer via talking drum if necessary. Bits are bits.
If one of these laws passes, Hollywood will not be the big winner, not in the short term or the long term. The winner will be the law firms that have these folks as clients, as well as law forms across the country who service anyone doing business on the internet.
Poorly drafted laws like these will create a lot of legal activity. SOPAlawyer.com is already registered.
Alas it won’t stop people from copying anything and everything that is produced in, or converted to, digital. And transferring it. Because that is what digital transmission is all about. Making copies.
technically, nothing is produced in digital. it is converted from analog at some stage.
analog is easier to protect as I.P. because exact copies are not possible as they are with digital.
Will tucows be blocking out yummy names as well