As our friend Cory Doctorow explained yesterday on BoingBoing, “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.” BoingBoing cannot continue under such a legal regimen, and neither can we.
It's not just about SOPA or PIPA - though that may be the form the issue takes today. The question is who controls the channels of communication: a handful of corporations for profit, or the rest of us.
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