

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.

If we failed to take this precaution, our finances could be frozen,

our ad broker forced to pull ads from our site, and depending on which version of the bill goes to the vote, our domains

confiscated, and, because our server is in Canada, our IP address

would be added to a US-wide blacklist that every ISP in the country

would be required to censor.

This is the part of the post where I'm supposed to say something

reasonable like, "Everyone agrees that piracy is wrong, but this is

the wrong way to fight it."

But you know what? Screw that.

Even though a substantial portion of my living comes from the

entertainment industry, I don't think that any amount of

"piracy" justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the

consequences of one's actions. Big Content haven't just declared war

on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the "fun" Internet: they've

declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police

brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used

the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their

oppressors, every abused

kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of

children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life

is worth living despite the torment she's experiencing, every grassroots political

campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place

— as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue

workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the

people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the

independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.

The contempt for human rights on display with SOPA and PIPA is more

than foolish. Foolishness can be excused. It's more than greed. Greed

is only to be expected. It is evil, and it must be fought.

SOPA Strike is compiling a list of sites that are also going dark for Jan 18. If you want an Internet where human rights, free speech and the rule of law are not subordinated to the entertainment industry's profits, I hope you'll join us on it.

Thank you.