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The Internet’s most popular destinations, including eBay, Google, Facebook, and Twitter seem to view Hollywood-backed copyright legislation as an existential threat.
It was Google co-founder Sergey Brin who warned that the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act “would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.” Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman argue that the bills give the Feds unacceptable “power to censor the Web.”
But these companies have yet to roll out the heavy artillery.
When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you’ll know they’re finally serious.
True, it would be the political equivalent of a nuclear option–possibly drawing retributions from the the influential politicos backing SOPA and Protect IP–but one that could nevertheless be launched in 2012.
“There have been some serious discussions about that,” says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. “It has never happened before.” (See CNET’s SOPA FAQ.)
Web firms may be outspent tenfold on lobbyists, but they enjoy one tremendous advantage over the SOPA-backing Hollywood studios and record labels: direct relationships with users.
How many Americans feel a personal connection with an amalgamation named Viacom — compared with voters who have found places to live on Craigslist and jobs (or spouses) on Facebook and Twitter? How would, say, Sony Music Entertainment, one of the Recording Industry Association of America’s board members, cheaply and easily reach out to hundreds of millions of people?
Protect IP and SOPA, of course, represent the latest effort from the Motion Picture Association of America, the RIAA, and their allies to counter what they view as rampant piracy on the Internet, especially offshore sites such as ThePirateBay.org. It would allow the Justice Department to obtain an order to be served on search engines, Internet providers, and other companies forcing them to make a suspected piratical Web site effectively vanish, a kind of Internet death penalty.
There are early signs that the nuclear option is being contemplated. Wikimedia (as in Wikipedia) called SOPA an “Internet Blacklist Bill.” Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has proposed an article page blackout as a way to put “maximum pressure on the U.S. government” in response to SOPA.
The Tumblr microblogging site generated 87,834 calls to Congress over SOPA. Over at GoDaddyBoycott.org, a move-your-domain-name protest is scheduled to begin today over the registrar’s previous–and still not repudiated–enthusiasm for SOPA. Popular image hosting site Imgur said yesterday it would join the exodus too.
Technically speaking, it wouldn’t be difficult to pull off. Web companies already target advertisements based on city or ZIP code.
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Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57349540-281/sopa-opponents-may-go-nuclear-and-other-2012-predictions/
Look, we had better not see any of you dressing as this guy for Halloween, ok? Have a heart. Leave this dude’s balls alone! This story is heartbreaking. If you wish to lend this man a hand (we mean that figuratively, as in “make a donation”) his email is at the bottom of the page. Wowoweeewah. Between this and the sad tale of Mrs. Rancic, we’re not feeling very good about the state of medical affairs ’round here these days. Read on (if you can stomach it):
It sat in front of him, on top of a pillow that rested on a milk crate.
He sprinkled baby powder on it — what looked like a huge watermelon encased in a compression bandage — but the unmistakable smell of urine couldn’t be completely smothered.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” 47-year-old Wesley Warren Jr. said in the poorly lit apartment. “It’s freakish.”
What sat in front of where Warren was seated in shorts — what is actually attached to him — was more than 100 pounds of scrotum, the protective sac of skin and muscle that contains his testicles.
“It’s not easy to get around,” he said, standing and groaning as he lifted his scrotum off its makeshift pedestal and carefully let it hang almost to the floor. “It makes me stay in most of the time.”
If there is a more unusual medical condition afflicting someone from Southern Nevada, the medical community or patient hasn’t come forward with it. Warren has gone public, even though he knows there will be those who laugh at him, because he desperately wants a costly surgery to correct the scrotal elephantiasis that became part of his life nearly three years ago.
Daily bouts of depression — “I want to have real friends and a relationship with a woman” — throw him into the depths of despair. “But I’m not suicidal. I’m too strong for that.”
Much like Victorian England’s Joseph Merrick, whose life with severe deformities became the subject of both the play and movie, “The Elephant Man,” Warren has concluded that to escape his present life he must allow himself to be exhibited.
Unlike Merrick, who used freak show exhibitions to stay alive, Warren at least has enough money through social programs to put food in his stomach and a roof over his head.
In hopes of getting the money for a possible corrective procedure that physicians have told him can cost about $1 million, Warren swallowed his pride by outing himself recently on shock jock Howard Stern’s national satellite radio and cable TV freak segment.
But he used the pseudonym “Johnathan from Las Vegas” to let people know that his penis is so buried in his scrotal tissue that he can’t direct his urination and often sprays the area around him.
He also told — to more laughter on the set — of how he can’t sit down for a bowel movement and must catch it in the same kind of pail used in casinos for coins.
“I don’t like being a freak, who would?” Warren said. “But I figured that the Stern show is listened to by millions of people and they might want to help me. I hope some millionaire or billionaire will want to help me.”
Many people have reached him through his benefitballsack@yahoo.com email address, he said.
Source: http://www.lvrj.com/health/las-vegas-man-suffering-from-100-pound-scrotum-needs-1-million-for-surgery-131962533.html?ref=533
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