Green Land Rover to ‘Go Dark’ on 18 Jan 2012 to protest against SOPA

On January 18 Green Land Rover will be going dark for a day to protest against the proposed introduction of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the USA.

SOPA will not just affect those in the USA, it’s every website on the internet. It basically means that it would be illegal for anyone to link to any website without checking that the site does not infringe copyright. This means constantly reviewing your website links to make sure the sites they are linked to do not add copyrighted content to the original linked material.

This puts a massive amount of responsibility on to all website owners as it means that if a site is prosecuted under this legislation the following would occur: –

  1. Domain name could be confiscated (US domains only I wonder?).
  2. IP address added to a blacklist .
  3. No legal process to carry out these actions.
This is a giant shift of responsibility and seems to be an excuse for wealthy companies to indiscriminately trample on smaller organisations who cannot afford to defend themselves. The US Government criticises other nations over suppressing free speech via the internet (China, Syria etc…) but they want to introduce a bill that will effectively do this!
We feel that this legislation is wrong and GLR will be protesting against it by ‘Going Dark’ on January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC). Although GLR is a UK based site we have put the US time first as the campaign is about US law (albeit having global implications!)

Further information can be found here: –

Stop American Censorship Site

Reddit blog on SOPA

WordPress view on SOPA/PIPA

Jason

GLR Webmaster & Contributor. In real life I'm a Software Engineer developing embedded software mainly in the automotive industry. Freelander 2 SE TD4 in Tonga Green Discovery 4 SDV6 HSE in Aintree Green Defender XS also in Tonga Green - Gone Freelander Td4 ES TD4 in Epsom Green - Gone Freelander Td4 Kalahari TD4 in Epsom Green - Gone Freelander XEi in Epsom Green - Gone

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