Fuck yes :D

Does that mean that 82 Senators support PIPA?

We all still have a lot of work to do. Lamar Smith and Harry Reid apparently just won't listen to reason when presented with it, so we'll have to keep working on their friends.

I also thought it was interesting how NBC tried to sweep the protest under the rug buy keeping things short and sweet and saying only a "handful" of sites were involved.

Because 75.000 is a handful these days, obviously.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/hollywood-fights-internet-protest-with-tv-ad-billboard.ars

this has pot calling the cattle black aaaaaaaal over it's face

The only Lamar I can fully support.

YAAAAAAAAAAY!

Thankfully we can now look forward to them slipping this legislation through piecemeal on the backs of other pieces of legislation. Their corporate overseers will get what they want.

www.maddox.xmission.com

Stay vigilant, my compatriots! The forces of Evil are not completely beaten and they will continue to try and push their twisted view on reality with all their money as they can. They must be watched like hawks and their doings observed with complete scrutiny.

Victory is ours... for now.

Lamar Smith own web site was found to be in Violation of copy right laws. Yes the Sponsor of SOPA is in violation of his own bill, lol.

http://mashable.com/2012/01/12/sopa-sponsor/

I spent my day yesterday debating with people, spreading the word and signing petitions and emailing any representative I could who's site wasn't slowed to shit because of the mass traffic to their sites. (even figured out a few reps sites -and don't hold me to this now- managed to misdirect people to a "we can't complete this link" type page, with a "broken" URL, despite the page in the address bar being completely correct (meaning, the site it was trying to reach was a WWW. site, but the site it was trying to actually go to was WWW.WWW. -which goes no where)

Hell, yesterday was the most I used Facebook ever (which still not saying much) since I started the account -all because I was getting the word out.

Any way, I don't exactly see yesterday as "safe to say" it was successful. Thats kind of patting ourselves on the back before the work is actually done. It did go great, but we didn't stop PIPA, which is supposed to (as far as I know, unless I miss read/or am behind on things) still supposed to be looked at next week (again, question marks) and SOPA is still around the corner in February because it was pushed back. In my mind we really should have a few more blackouts planned, if we're really going to shake up the internet.

Kotaku kind of frustrated me yesterday. They (over) stated their reason for not joining the blackouts was because "we're a news organization" but no where in that did they decide to say where they stood one way or the other on the issue. Their whole article dodged saying much either way while telling people "well cover these protests but won't join" and urged people to keep informed. Not saying they needed to blackout, but a stance would have been nice. Lifehacker (another Gawker site) didn't black out, but their article both made a stance (they're highly against both SOPA and PIPA) but also made me understand why they didn't black out (Because, to them, it'd be preaching to the Choir, seeing as most of their reader base knows they're against it, and is against it themselves -still not a rousing show of support for those against, but still, they made a stand). Even Gizmodo made me believe they were against it with their primer/coverage.

A lot of people ended up called out Kotaku for just wanting to continue receiving ad revenue, as if they couldn't go a day without it, and I'm pretty sure a few people hinted that Kotaku was afraid the ESA would blacklist them, specially from E3. Most, if not all, of those people were carted off to their complaints hashtag, effectively removed from the conversation.

Kudo's to the Brits for coming out against it. I may say bad things about how the retail end of the business is over there, but your actual game industry has some serious balls.

Speaking of Lamar, its come out (and take it with a grain of salt) that the picture that sits as the background (it may not be there any more after this came out) of his website was a picture that could be traced back to a photographer, and that he -like most people who just lift pictures for backgrounds- probably didn't know the artist or ask permission to use it, making him just as much of a target for his own bill.

It's Glenn Beck, but he is completely against government regulation of the internet. Also, I had no idea of the power SOPA and PIPA would give to the DOJ, really scary.

http://web.gbtv.com/media/video.jsp?content_id=20061227&source=GBTV

And the cycle comes around again, just like when they tried to sneak in a SOPA-like bill last year. People were on board, then they weren't.

As much of a victory as this is, the battle is far from over. SOPA/PIPA won't pass this year, but there was 6 years between the Audio Home Recording Act and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This is a war that will likely not end any time soon, and all the entertainment industry has to do is wait us out, or catch us off our guard once.

Pop the corks for now, but gear up for the long haul. The incredible freedom over how we consume, create, and share media that the internet has allowed us is terrible for business. The entertainment industry will not stop until they regain at least some of the iron grip they had over our consumption pre-internet.

@dtomek

sigh, why do i get the feeling you're right? it's not like these are even conspiracy theories anymore, shit like that is documented to happen. i just... i just...

what the fuck, man? where did we all lose control? and why do i get the feeling that history books a hundred years from now are going to have some interesting and shitty things to say about this generation?

http://www.infowars.com/google-is-already-using-sopa-like-censorship/

@tekbunny

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of uni­versal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democra­cies -- the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. - Aldous Huxley

This time came for our distraction, and we couldn't possibly allow that. Now all they really have to do is hack it up into pieces, and wrap those pieces in boring, run of the mill legislation. People will take one look at it as a whole, and realize that reading and understanding it for what it is is infinitely less fun than playing Call of Duty, or watching any number of Kardashians sacrifice goats to Kim's booty.

Thats probably where we lost control, when people became too distracted to care that their house was on fire.

@tekbunny: "where did we all lose control?"
That's just the thing, though. As yesterday demonstrates, we as voters actually still have all the control we could ever wish for. Nearly 20% of the Senate flipping on this issue (whether they were persuaded on the merits or simply being expedient) in a single day is no laughing matter. As long as we stay organized, and stay vigilant on the issues we claim to care about, our word goes. Will that be hard to do? Sure, but it's definitely worth doing. We only lose control when we don't exercise it.

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012. PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.
Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.
Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.
So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they're all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it's all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules.
The reason they are always complainting about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It's all based on the fact that we're competition. We've proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We're just better than they are.
And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.
The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we've stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means "trash" in Swedish. The word PIPA means "a pipe" in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you'll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.
SOPA can't do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we'll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really. To fix the "problem of piracy" one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they're creating "culture" but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they're fat.
In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he's complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world - because he's jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you'd get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.
Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can't access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that.
THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

I know i have been beating this drum for the last few weeks but Ron Paul is the only GOP candidate to publicly denounce SOPA

http://news.yahoo.com/ron-paul-only-gop-candidate-publicly-denounce-sopa-000334022.html

As icing on the cake, hes back in Washington right now trying to author the repeal of the citizen detainee portion of the NDAA while simultaneously campaigning for the Presidency.

http://deadlinelive.info/2012/01/19/ron-paul-on-house-floor-calling-to-repeal-section-1021-of-ndaa/

And Jim , you just did an article on 18 senators, not to mention a piece on Obama the other day. Why do you refuse to give Paul the slightest nod?

@OneRed: I'd argue instead that our biggest obstacle in this respect is cynicism. There are certainly myriad, systemic problems with our government, but such time-honored techniques as "writing your representatives" and "voting" still work, and can trump any trillions of dollars corporations may wish to throw out. I can guarantee you that one of the biggest reasons people don't vote, or don't write their congress creatures, is the widespread idea that their voice or vote doesn't make a difference (it does).

I pride myself on keeping a healthy dose of cynicism in my life, but when it comes to political activism, cynicism is our worst enemy. We already have way too many forces trying to disenfranchise us to willingly disenfranchise ourselves.


@CaimDark: You can, however, pester the U.S. State Department about it. Call/write the embassy in your country, and mention that the USA talks a big game when it comes to freedom of expression abroad, but is crafting legislation that would limit it for the whole planet. True, it doesn't carry quite as much weight as being an American voter, but it does put pressure on the State Department, and in turn, the President.

RON PAUL 2012 - The only presidential candidate against all of the following: NDAA, SOPA, PIPA, and more. Wake up!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-v04Mo0fw0

God, I love you guys so much. I guess this is a wake up call for me to get more involved in this shit and to stop just trying to trust people in power to make good decisions.

Of course now that the ndaa has already passed I feel we might be met with some resistance should we all make too much of a ruckus... I'm sure that's just me being crazy though, right?

Yea its pretty clear these guys just don't get the fucking hint and I doubt they care, they will continue trying to push this, bigwigs from studios have paid to much to see this die now, thankfully its in the news, the word is spread, its out there and people will not take this lying down.

Vote all these crooks out come next election.

@Mikko: I agree that we're far from done, but don't worry, a clear message has been sent. They may not yet understand why, but at least now Congress does realize that this issue is extremely toxic.

@Kyousuke: If the congress people don't understand what, exactly the problem is, but they do understand that pressing the issue will cost them votes, they will drop it eventually. All the lobbying money, coke, and hooker parties in the world can't measure up to constituents breathing down your neck.

I do applaud the idea of "vote all these crooks out" in spirit, but as election after election shows us, you need to be very wary about the crooks you'll be voting in.