A short follow-up: all incoming messages will still be received and processed.
Only web page serving will be affected during that period.
Thanks
Jeff
On Jan 16, 2012, at 1:06 PM, Jeff Breidenbach wrote:
> 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.
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