MoBTalk.net will go dark 1/18 to support the SOPA strike

[Father Wrath]

MoBTalk.net will be dark from 8 AM to 8 PM Wednesday, January 18 2012 in support of the SOPA strike

http://sopastrike.com

[mysteryguest]

I guess this is google version of going dark?

goog.png

[SomeGuy555]

Well done: Very responsible.

[Father Wrath]

If you've bookmarked topics or forums, you can still get in here.

[Father Wrath]

Thank you for bearing without us during this time

[mysteryguest]

Yay, we're back!!

[coltsfan1955]

It is good to see anyone make a decision about who's side they are on.

[travis bickel]

Good job, FW and Curm.

[ST]

I've not been around as I've been a little busy, but I wanted to say this was a good idea.

The good news is that this kind of netroots activism did put the brakes on SOPA for now. Clearly, more needs to be done to protect intellectual property from online piracy because people are having their work stolen and are losing a lot of money because of it.

But as I said on Twitter a while back, SOPA amounts to smacking a spider with a sledgehammer. It's far too draconian. A more measured approach would be effective without drastically changing the Internet.

[SomeGuy555]

SOPA is bigger than a sledgehammer... It's killing that same ant with a nuclear bomb.

Really, we better hope this doesn't come back up for consideration, because there's a real possibility that other countries could start blocking our traffic, which effectively breaks the "universal" Internet. Well, for the U.S., anyway. The rest of the world could just choose to route around us, and consider our networks to be unsafe for commerce.

Really, if I was consulting a client overseas, if they did anything media-related I'd encourage them to block traffic from the United States. This inconceivably ridiculous standard of legal liability (extending to foreign nationals on foreign soil) where executives will be taken to prison because their users shared illegal files is so totally beyond the pale that, if a customer is exclusively a foreign company with no business presence in the United States, I'd strongly encourage them to simply block all traffic from all known U.S. IP addresses rather than accept the risk.