I’m not going to pretend to speak for anyone associated with Knuckleballs but myself, but I want to express publicly my opposition to SOPA and PIPA.
If you aren’t familiar with these pieces of proposed legislation, please do yourself a favor and look them up. In a nutshell, however, these laws are purported to protect movie studios and recording companies from piracy. That sounds like a good and noble cause, right? After all, we all believe intellectual property should be protected.
But I… and many others… believe this legislation goes way too far. It would not only require us here at Knuckleballs not to pirate material (as if I would know how to do that anyway, right?), but would require us to constantly monitor all sites to which we link to assure none of the people running those sites are smarter than I am at that kind of thing. If someone we link to ends up doing something wrong, it could force us offline.
No, that wouldn’t put us “out of business.” You may have noticed we don’t include advertising here so we don’t make any money from our blog at all (dang it).
But it could have that effect on any number of valuable internet sites.
A number of sites have “gone dark” today to demonstrate their opposition to SOPA (Wikipedia’s English version, for one).
Others have simply blacked out their logo.
I’m not even smart enough to know how to do that, but I do know how to simply delete our logo and that is why it is not visible in the banner the rest of the day.
If you’d like more information or to learn what you can do to oppose these laws, you might want to check out Google and Wikipedia.
I’m also not really interested in a debate on the topic here, so comments will be turned off for this post.
– Jim Crikket
[it’s ok, he can speak for me as well.
I will go so far as to add that A) we do our utmost to credit the originators of ANY material we post to here – we believe in intellectual property and want to be sure that people get just dues for their own creativity but B) no way in blazes we have the ability to do what this legislation would require at face value and C) we have no idea how this very vague bit of legislation would actually be applied once attorneys and courts get hold of it..
Bad laws are just that – no matter how good the intentions. If it’s not ready for primetime, don’t pass it. It’s easy math.
– CapitalBabs]