If you are using our on-line archive service (The Mail Archive) to read MoPo
posts, be advised that this web site will be DOWN for 24 hours on Wednesday,
January 18, 2012.
The Mail Archive is going dark to protest SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act
that has been proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives and PIPA, the
Protect IP Act, pending in the U.S. Senate. Other major on-line sites are
also participating, including Wikipedia.
Scott
MoPo List Owner
The statement from the administrators of The Mail Archive follows:
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.
Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com
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