Did we do that?

[Redith]

Hey when you go to petopia.com there is some weird link where it says congress is votting to shut down free speech websites like facebook. Did you guys put that up or were we haxxed

[Finduilas]

Wow sh**. Just noticed it. I could swear it was not there when I looked up a chimera about a couple of hours ago... Weird.

[Chimera]

i really hope that-- if that is true-- that it doesnt go through

[Mania]

I put the banner up on Petopia and Warcraft Mounts in support of American Censorship Day. You can find out more at the americancensorship.org website that the banner takes you to.

Edit: The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has some great resources on the topic. You can start on their homepage or here: https://www.eff.org/issues/coica-intern ... right-bill

[Finduilas]

Thanks for explaining it. Was already freaking because now I've seen it on an other page, too and was already thinking about conspiracy theories

[AdamSavage]

Good thing I do not live in the United States.

[Lisaara]

Yeah. The Protect IP bill is real and should be taken seriously.

Here's an example, if it goes through. If you roleplay anything thats copyrighted, you're a felon and it could ruin your life.

[cowmuflage]

I'd try to help but legaly I can't tell the US gov anything seeing as I'm not a citirzen of the US.

[Chimera]

if this passes, regardless if you live in the US or not, any websites (and does it include online games?) that have free chat and thats being run from the US and any place under US law affect everyone that goes to those sites? Isnt Petopia run on US grounds and thus subject to bills like this? (i have no idea how to word it, im not very good with anything to do with politics, im very under-educated when it comes to such things)

[Sonata]

It also affects sites such as Youtube because none of the videos posted are theirs.
I already signed a petition against the bill on Avaaz.org personally and so have many others even outside the US, including me since I live outside the US. Nobody wants this thing to come true and I hope it doesn't.

EDIT: fixing, I shouldn't write things at ten in the morning.

[Lisaara]

if this passes, regardless if you live in the US or not, any websites (and does it include online games?) that have free chat and thats being run from the US and any place under US law affect everyone that goes to those sites? Isnt Petopia run on US grounds and thus subject to bills like this? (i have no idea how to word it, im not very good with anything to do with politics, im very under-educated when it comes to such things)

Yup. Our beloved Petopia would be shut down.

[Mania]

If the bill were to pass in the SOPA form (the Senate's Protect IP Act has slightly different details although it's not much better), and a member on this forum were to post material that violated someone's copyright, the holder of that copyright could send a complaint to the my ISP and my ISP would have to take down all of Petopia within (I believe) 5 days. The copyright holder could also demand that Google de-index all of Petopia from search results. They can do this without proving in court that the content violates their copyright. If they do take it to court, I (as well as my ISP, the person who posted the violation, and possibly Google) would be legally liable for any monetary damages from the infringement.

For comparison: Right now, if someone posts something which violates copyright, I have what they call "safe harbor": they send me a notice and so long as I deal with the problem (remove the violation) I myself am not liable.

If the copyright holder went to the trouble of obtaining a court order and could show that copyright violations had occurred repeatedly here, they could have www.wow-petopia.com permanently blocked from DNS lookup. But (outside of the security problems inherent with mucking around with DNS), I'm a lot less worried about that than I am about being taken down for stuff that a random member posts, possibly without even realizing that it's a copyright violation.

This is why some people are saying that this bill would change the character of the internet in fundamental and disastrous ways: it suddenly becomes very risky to run any type of social community that does not pre-screen every piece of user content. And because that pre-screening is prohibitively expensive ... Goodbye YouTube. Goodbye 4chan. Goodbye Facebook. Goodbye forums.

Am I exaggerating? Very little, if at all. Would I take down these forums? The minute it looked like I might end up in court or in debt over them. Would that be likely to happen? ... I don't know. And that's the problem.

[Teigan]

.

[Finduilas]

Would it also affect sites that are hosted in an other coutry? So if you are using a forum from France/Italy/Canada/... and post something that would violate someone's copyright. Would there be a punishment, too?

[Kalliope]

Wouldn't Blizzard have to contact Mania for any of this to actually happen in the first place?

That's not to downplay the significance of any of these freedoms being taken away; it's still a terrible thing that could happen. Certainly some copyright holders would go on witch hunts; I'm not sure Blizzard would be one of them necessarily.

[Royi]

Wouldn't Blizzard have to contact Mania for any of this to actually happen in the first place?

That's not to downplay the significance of any of these freedoms being taken away; it's still a terrible thing that could happen. Certainly some copyright holders would go on witch hunts; I'm not sure Blizzard would be one of them necessarily.

Yeah any copyright holders with the Metallica-mindset would certainly make a lot of good websites go to waste.

Would international IP's not be affected then? IE if the website were to be hosted outside of the US but then cater to US people still... Kind of like how Online gambling poker sites have to be from the UK or something.

I'm mostly ignorant. I originally thought this was just a joke

[Mania]

Blizzard could shut down Petopia today if they wanted. They haven't shown any desire to and I have a high level of confidence that they won't.
Under SOPA, the RIAA could shut down Petopia over a bootleg Metallica video posted to the forums. I do not have as much confidence in reasonable behavior from the RIAA.

Non-US ISPs mostly don't fall under this bill for obvious reasons - except for the bit about the bill coercing US payment processors (MasterCard and Visa, for example) to stop payments to 'infringing' sites. And the bit about coercing Google to de-index them from search. Oh, and the bit where the government coerces US ISP's to blacklist the non-US sites from DNS so that US users can't reach them. (Well, we could - it's easy enough to go around DNS. But that would be illegal.)

I normally don't get involved in this kind of internet brou-ha-ha, but this one's quite bad. On the other hand, a number of Congressional supporters have indicated in the past few days that they are having second thoughts about this bill and its unintended consequences. So that's good!

[cowmuflage]

Blizzard's not Disney they like fan stuff. Unlike Diseny who froced a small south island town school to remove all their Disney style paintings in the loo.

[Kalliope]

Blizzard could shut down Petopia today if they wanted. They haven't shown any desire to and I have a high level of confidence that they won't.
Under SOPA, the RIAA could shut down Petopia over a bootleg Metallica video posted to the forums. I do not have as much confidence in reasonable behavior from the RIAA.

Ah, there we go; that's definitely the root of the problem. >_<

I normally don't get involved in this kind of internet brou-ha-ha, but this one's quite bad. On the other hand, a number of Congressional supporters have indicated in the past few days that they are having second thoughts about this bill and its unintended consequences. So that's good!

Good. My initial reaction was that "this will go over about as well as Prohibition" - glad that some of the higher ups seem to be getting that.

[Boven]

Blizzard's not Disney they like fan stuff. Unlike Diseny who froced a small south island town school to remove all their Disney style paintings in the loo.

I doubt Blizzard would use SOPA to shut Petopia down. While Blizzard accepts and even encourages fan sites, many companies don't and that's where the real danger lies. As Mania pointed out, if someone uploaded some bootleg music or copyrighted images to one of the forums, the companies that actually own the material could use SOPA to shut the site down.

The scary part of that is that if someone was angry at Mania, another user here, or just the community in general, there's the potential for them to do just that and get rid of Petopia.