The Mail Archive will be participating in SOPA Blackout Day. On January 18th, 2012 we will be dark.
The Stop Online Piracy Act H.R.3261 (and PIPA, its sister bill S.968) is a proposed United States law, please read it yourself. The basic goal of the bills is to censor all access to non-US websites involved with copyright violation. We feel there are some fundamental flaws with the proposed legislation. Lawrence Tribe, a Harvard Constitutional Law Professor points out 1) "Although SOPA's supporters have described the bill as directed at "foreign rogue websites," the definitions in the bill are not in fact limited to foreign sites or to sites engaged in egregious piracy." 2) "To compound the problem, SOPA provides that a complaining party can file a notice alleging that it is harmed by the activities occurring on the site "or portion thereof." Conceivably, an entire website containing tens of thousands of pages could be targeted if only a single page were accused of infringement." 3) "In effect, the bill would impose the very monitoring obligation that existing law (in the form of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998) expressly does not require. SOPA would undo the statutory framework that has created the foundation for many web-based businesses." As a public email archival service, we are very aware and appreciative of America's long history of free speech. We don't usually feel like a cog in a censorship machine. Except for the 153 deletion requests from list administrators, 4 DMCA takedown notices, and 36 suppression actions by global internet search engines in 2011. That's on a corpus of 100+ million messages. Now imagine getting sued or criminally prosecuted for a message that links to some shady portion of the internet? Or when someone forwards a copyrighted article to a mailing list? The Mail Archive has proudly provided archival service for 14 years. But in the end, we are a three person, part-time small business. If SOPA passes, each of us will have to think: We have families. The risk looks enormous.
