SOPA - What are you/your business doing about SOPA?

[HWH Andrew]

As many of the United State's businesses are aware of, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is looking to allow the government to shutdown any website deemed to assist with piracy. But the government determines what is considered piracy.

Reddit, a social news website where the registered users submit content (Wikipedia), is preforming the "nuclear option" and shutting down their services on Jan. 18 for 12 hours and displaying a video message about SOPA.

Google, Facebook, PayPal and Wikipedia are still deciding on what to do about SOPA and are looking for a synchronized black out in protest of SOPA but it is undetermined on what they will do officially.

What are you/your business doing about SOPA?

We are considering posting a opening page featuring censored words on it as an effect of SOPA, although we haven't fully decided.

 

[trishia]

it is true that sopa doesn't eliminate piracy, in google blog, it says that pirated website would simply just change their domain name or ip. so i am not in favor of sopa.

 

[handsonhosting]

Google placed the patch on their logo today in support of the Anti-SOPA movement. Wikipedia put up a dark page. Facebook, Paypal, Twitter and just about every other company out there, while supporting the movement, are not going to take their site offline for 5 minutes on purpose let alone 24 hours!

We don't support SOPA - we signed the petition and did our due dilligence to inform our clients and communities that we're involved with and encouraged those to call or send letters to their congress people.

That being said - blacking out entire sites is an abuse of owners power. I'm all for posting a banner (like google did) or a 5 second delay before showing information, but I've been to a number of companies that are 100% dark today. This means I can't even contact them for customer support. Could you imagine Amazon shutting down all sales for a 24 hour period? It would do more damage than good!

So I do (and my company) support the Anti-SOPA and PIPA movements, but removing content and shutting down sites - that's a publicity stunt (and not a very good one). I hope google indexes their "down" sites, and removes their rankings for the SERPs