A message from another forum that may be worth consideration:

Quote:TT Nut members,

On January 18th 2012 the ttnut website will be blacked out (unavailable) in protest of the SOPA act in congress.

Long story short, ttnut relies on your input and info. If you've ever added a link on this website to copyrighted material somewhere on the internet, the government will have the right to shut down this website at the copyrighted material owner's request. No explanation, no questions asked.

The end.

Not just this website - ANY site.

-A

This is the first time that i am hearing about this. If it's true most forums will be out of service soon.

I did find this <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act</a><!-- m --> that has some info on it.

I have seen a fair amount of copyrighted material posted here, mainly things such as trackplans and photos.

It would only take one trackplan from Model Railroader Magazine to be posted here to get the whole site shut down.

Justinmiller171 Wrote:I have seen a fair amount of copyrighted material posted here, mainly things such as trackplans and photos.

It would only take one trackplan from Model Railroader Magazine to be posted here to get the whole site shut down.

Well, if they are actual pictures, please report the posts (Triangle in upper right with the "!" in it) because in our posting guidelines it states that any outside pictures should be linked to, not presented here as an image..

.... Of course.. after looking for it.. I can't find where it's stated.

To start with, we work hard to keep copyrighted material from appearing here without the owners permission. If we see any, or if it's reported we will deal with it immediately. We have yet to have an owner of copyright material request we remove it, but we are self-policing in that respect so if you see something that you know shouldn't be here without permission, than we'd appreciate it if you'd let us know.

Secondly, I'm not defending the bill, it is another way the government is taking an approach to a problem that could have a devastating affect on some innocent people. That being said, we are all aware of the reason behind this bill, the protection of mass violations where sites allow you to upload and download music and movies that they know are protected and they are doing it without compensation or permission of those that spent time and money creating these things. I don't believe that someone is going to get out a court order to have a site shut down because of one or two incidents where a copyright photo is displayed without permission. I would think that the courts would require them to show that they made an attempt to get the material removed first. They will be going after large sites that allow the exchange of these kinds of material on a continuing basis. However, by taking the shotgun approach, they may not only hit their targets, but a few stray pellets can hit a few surrounding things that they weren't intending to hit.

It is fine that some sites are supporting this protest, but I think having Google, YouTube or Facebook shutting down for a day would have a bigger influence than a few forums like ours doing so. My personal opinion is that the bill will never make it into law the way it's written, and if it does, I do think it will be challenged in court very quickly. I would also think it would be difficult to enforce since many of these sites are in other countries.

.... and - of course - it's stalled....

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9223461/Opponent_says_SOPA_may_be_stalled_in_Congress">http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/ ... n_Congress</a><!-- m -->

and it seems to be focused on non-US sites.. So I guess US sites have always been punishable, they just had no actions they could take towards sites that are hosted overseas... until this "access blocking" bill...

Tempest in a tea cup.

Congressmen propose a lot more laws than actually make it into the law books, and SOPA ran into serious trouble over the idea of messing with DNS records to (sorta) prevent some people (the ones to inept to get a list of ip adresses and then communicating by ip instead of hostname) from going to piracy websites to download stuff - it was criticized quite severely as a bad idea ™ by bunches of people, including your president, since it would encourage many people to use uncensored DNS servers instead of secure DNS servers. Which opens up possibilities for far more disruption than some software piracy. So the law is not likely to make it out into the wild anytime soon.

And even if it some time made it into law, the focus is on blocking access to web sites which offer massive amounts of copyrighted materials, not on impounding small web forums here and there for very minor copyright infractions by posters.

So nothing much to worry about for Big Blue.

Smile,
Stein