The Millions

Curiosities

Get Educated on SOPA

1. Oscar Raymundo
   at 4:23 pm on January 17, 2012

   Shouldn’t publishing be on the side of enforcing against copyright infringement and file sharing?

2. C. Max Magee
   at 4:24 pm on January 17, 2012

   Not if they are going to do it in a way that will cause so much more harm than good.

3. Oscar Raymundo
   at 4:30 pm on January 17, 2012

   The only “alarming” ramification I can find anywhere is Internet giants arguing it is censorship and don’t want the responsibility of becoming cyber police. Frankly, Google arguing for an open internet is mockable considering it’s obvious they want to own it.

4. C. Max Magee
   at 4:53 pm on January 17, 2012

   I would have to become cyber police too and anyone owning their own site would as well. If any site we or one of our commenters linked to over the last nine years was found to be in violation of this law, the onus will be on us to create a system to scrub links from that domain from our 9 years of archives and put a system in place to prevent a link to that domain from ever appearing on our site in the future. I’m not in a position to pay someone 10 or 20 grand to build a system to do that, so that would be the end of The Millions.

   The problem here is that they are unable or unwilling to target the copyright violators so they are deputizing us all against our will to and forcing us to police the actions of everyone who interacts with the site.

5. Oscar Raymundo
   at 5:10 pm on January 17, 2012

   Wished the original post included this insider information. Obviously many smaller sites would be at peril, I’m just hesitant to eat up Silicon Valley using this as an affront on creative global internet expression when really it’s way more self-serving.

   I would rather have the internet be moderated by individual site owners than the government. If I were to throw a big trashy party and invited a bunch of thieves, you bet I’d have to hire my own security and sign a liability waiver. Websites shouldn’t wipe their hands completely clean of any the copyright infringement they may harbor (or encourage).

6. Nick Moran
   at 6:24 pm on January 17, 2012

   The original post did include this insider information. It was actually the point of the post, and the link to the Reddit article. Also, it’s not that “many smaller sites would be at peril,” it’s that every site on the internet would be at peril.

   Nobody is defending people who infringe on another person’s copyright. At least not here on this site. Rather, and to use your analogy, we shouldn’t get arrested because our next door neighbors had a sleazy party in our shared backyard.