Our policy is don't link to stuff that might make people come after mathowie. So, we prefer if you don't link to torrents of copyrighted material or blatant copyright violations (full scans of comics or books, more because they're likely to go away than we're afraid of the boogeyman) but linking to stuff other places is not necessarily an issue if you have every reason to think that the material/link will stay up [i.e. isn't some fly-by-night scribd thing].I think we'll work on some sort of interstitial "This is what you can do" page for next Wednesday"
To some extent, on a personal basis, I feel like it'd be punishing people we like—the Metafilter userbase—while not inconveniencing the folks who are actually the bad actors here. It's not mefites' fault that SOPA is an issue, and I like the logo-munge-and-metatalk-thread thing we did previously a lot better than just shutting everybody out, if we were to do something.Punished with increased productivity. Obviously if metafilter went away forever, it would be horrible. But a one-day break wouldn't be so terrible.
All three bills take aim at any website beyond U.S. borders that distribute counterfeit or copyright infringing products.posted by desjardins at 7:59 AM on January 13, 2012
On January 18, Boing Boing will join Reddit and other sites around the Internet in "going dark" to oppose SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world. Boing Boing could never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we'd have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren't in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits.posted by gman at 4:47 PM on January 14, 2012 [5 favorites]
So, in short: the U.S. Department of Commerce can order your domain name removed from the DNS root. Your domain name will no longer resolve to anyone in the world who is using the traditional DNS system (which is, to a first approximation, 100% of people). It doesn't matter with who you registered your domain: the resolution of name to IP address happens within a different system, one controlled by the U.S.Not exactly. The U.S can't really pull domains registered with domain names from other countries. They can't pull whatever.ir, or whatever.cn.
posted by vorfeed at 4:24 PM on January 10, 2012 [35 favorites]