SOPA Blackout
MARC participated in SOPA Blackout Day. marc.info and
lists.kde.org were dark from midnight US/Eastern January 18th, 2012, until
midnight US/Pacific the following day.
The Stop Online
Privacy Act (H.R. 3261, SOPA) and its companion bill, Protect IP Act (S.
968, PIPA) are proposed laws being considered by the United States
Congress.
If they (or something like them) were to become law in the U.S., mailing
list archive sites based there, like MARC, would almost certainly need to shut
down or move out of the country. SOPA and PIPA promise to punish websites that
publish content generated by third parties, without due process (i.e. sites and
their administrators are guilty until proven innocent). It would make us
liable for any content posted to any mailing list, that anyone may claim
to be copyrighted material (they do not have to prove their claim; they do not
have to be right).
In protest, many sites on the Internet are blacking out on January 18th.
Here are a number of links with more information about SOPA, and how (if
you are a U.S. voter) to contact your senators and representative:
reddit.com blackout
wikipedia.org blackout
The Mail Archive blackout
The EFF
The people who brought you the Internet
craigslist's SOPA/PIPA page
A nice SOPA infographic
(Some of the above links may not work during the blackout.)
Our apologies to MARC's non-U.S. users, who will be hurt by this, but can't
do anything to stop SOPA/PIPA. If SOPA does become law in the United
States, you can help:
we would need volunteers to move MARC out of the United States, as we could no
longer safely run it.