Bob, the WMF is potentially vulnerable to provisions in SOPA/PIPA through many avenues: 1) It hosts a large number of servers overseas in order to serve the other Wikimedia communities. This could cause it to be interpreted as one of those "rogue foreign sites" and subject it to censorship. 2) It has a large number of domain names it uses or that are associated with it that are on foreign registries (e.g. wikimedia.de) that could cause it to be interpreted as one of those "rogue foreign sites" and subject it to censorship. 3) The encyclopedia itself is highly reliant on external sources, many of which are hosted overseas, and which could start disappearing under concerted censorship campaigns by people or corporations with vested interests. Imagine the Church of Scientology successfully getting DNS entries for sites critical of Scientology blocked, and then turning around and white-washing the Wikipedia articles by removing lots of facts which can no longer be sourced.
I don't think this list is appropriate for an involved discussion of the pros/cons of SOPA/PIPA, but your views on the matter are well outside the technological mainstream, which by and large does see grave dangers from SOPA/PIPA. It's not a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of Wikipedians were in favor of a Wikipedia blackout.
Some more info here: http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 5:15 PM, bob@racepacket.com wrote:
Luke: If that is your test, I would feel better if WMF had a policy that said, "No blackouts unless the existence of Wikipedia is threatened." If you read the Senate bill you can see that is not the case now. As a US website, Wikipedia is liable for contributory copyright infringement now, but this does not threaten its existence. If Wikipedia moved offshore, the bill would allow a court to order it to take technically feasible steps to remove links to a priate website. (We have an external link blacklist already.) So, that is not the threat.
Wikipedia has no plans to promote pirate websites from offshore. It does not process money for repayment to pirate websites.
Unless the Justice Dept and Federal judges go crazy, where is the existential threat? I think we need more rational discourse and less passion in all of this. Reading through the RFC does not instill confidence in Wikipedia decision-making process. Thanks, --Bob
The difference is those wars did not pose an imminent threat to the mere *existence* of Wikipedia, unlike SOPA and PIPA.
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