It’s SOPA Day!
Here in the United States of America, congress is considering a bill that attempts to protect copyrights, but instead may damage the Internet beyond repair.
To bring attention to this issue, many prominent websites are “going dark” on January 18th. These include Wikipedia, Mozilla, WordPress, O’Reilly, and Design Tools Monthly.
The Gizmodo website has a helpful explanation of SOPA here. And the O’Reilly site has a good explanation of why they’ve gone dark.
(If you would like to make your website temporarily display the animated, spotlighted graphic shown above, just temporarily replace your “index.html” file with the one from this website.)
Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.
Jeff Gamet at The Mac Observer notes: “ProPublica is helping make it easy to see where politicians stand on the proposed legislation. … ProPublica lists which politicians support or oppose the bills, and can sort by state, age, years served, how much money politicians have accepted from media companies, and more.”
Read his article at
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/congress_tracking_who_supports_sopa_pipa/
Or, go directly to ProPublica at http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/
Google hasn’t exactly “gone dark” (you can still search for stuff), but they do have a special graphic and notice: http://www.google.com/
At the Guardian website, Frédéric Filloux wrote a thoughtful piece about “Piracy is part of the digital ecosystem”, with a subhead: “When it comes to digital piracy, there is a great deal of hypocrisy – one way another, everyone is doing it”.
He includes some enlightening statistics (and pie charts) that break down Internet usage in Europe and the U.S. Check it out: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/23/monday-note-piracy-sopa