Lest we thought that SOPA was dead and buried, a couple of further developments today have shown that hope is premature. Bill sponsor Lamar Smith is moving ahead with plans to continue marking the bill up and bring it back to the House agenda in February. The DNS blocking provision will be removed from the bill (for now—that doesn’t keep them from trying to add it back after the furor has died down), but it still contains a number of other provisions that could prove harmful to the freedom that is the lifeblood of the Internet. Meanwhile, former Senator...

A number of websites are going dark tomorrow to protest the SOPA legislation that could impose harsh restrictions upon the Internet. These sites include Mozilla, reddit for 12 hours, and Wikipedia for a full 24 hours. Google will also place a SOPA-related link on its homepage. Wales explained that the Wikipedia blackout comes as a result of feedback from the Wikipedia community, Not everybody is sanguine about the blackout. On just-launched Silicon Valley news site Pando Daily, Paul Carr writes in agreement with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s tweet calling the decision “foolish”. Carr blasts Wales for “[making] a...

Wikipedia isn’t the only site considering a public demonstration of the evils of SOPA. Scribd has gone ahead and done it. Scribd has added a script to its page that blanks out documents word by word before users’ eyes, followed by a pop-up explaining what’s happening and why we should all be concerned about SOPA. This analysis of why SOPA is unconstitutional is cited as an example. (At least, in theory. It didn’t work on my computer, nor on those of some others who posted comments on Scribd’s post.) That puts me in mind of a tool I...

I had been planning to leave this story alone for a while, given that it’s not directly about e-books. But Universal made a really dumb move that should remind us all about the dangers of giving the content industry a bigger padlock to slap onto our digital printing presses, whichever medium we use. Remember that Megaupload music video that Universal slapped with a DMCA takedown? Tom Merritt of the daily news video blog Tech News Today covered the controversy on Monday, including the use of a couple of clips of the Megaupload video in question. By Monday night,...

Torrentfreak reports that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is considering blacking out the English version of Wikipedia as a protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act, following the success the Italian Wikipedia community had with a similar protest against restrictive legislation in Italy. By blanking out one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, the Wikipedia founder believes the community can send a strong message to their representatives in Washington. With billions of pageviews a month, a Wikipedia protest will definitely be noticed. “My own view is that a community strike was very...

This story might need to be taken with a grain of salt based on its sources, but it could have some serious implications if true. Megaupload, like Rapidshare, is a cyber-locker site where people can upload files of any kind for others to download. Many of those files are illicitly-copied commercial material, which naturally gives Hollywood, record labels, and publishers (after all, this material does include both e-books and audiobooks) conniptions. Recently, a number of music celebrities recorded a music video in support of Megaupload. This was considered a newsworthy event, and covered by a number of places, but...

The New York Times reports on a mysterious sales spike that two local Long Island papers experienced last week, as mysterious buyers swooped in to grab every available copy from newsstands at $1.50 a pop. The papers had to print 64% more papers than usual to keep up with demand. The mysterious buyers were estimated to have snagged 4,000 out of the total 14,120 newsstand copies. The owner of the papers speculated that the mysterious buyers could have been “someone involved in a truly monumental school project; someone really proud of their grandchild on the honor roll; someone with...

I live in Springfield, Missouri. Republic isn’t exactly one of our suburbs, but it is the next town over, and just a few minutes away if I should want to visit. My brother used to live there, before moving to St. Louis. So I feel a little remiss in not having commented on the Republic school decision to remove two novels from their libraries in the wake of a Fundamentalist MSU professor objecting to their inclusion. Cory Doctorow posted about the whole thing earlier today on BoingBoing. Essentially, this professor objected to the books being available on the basis that he...

A few days ago, the Supreme Court struck down a controversial California law requiring restriction of violent video games to minors. Without going too deeply into analysis, the court found dubious the claims that violent games were somehow more harmful to minors than other violent media—and since California wasn’t trying to regulate those other media, it was unfair for it to try to regulate video games too. As Ars Technica’s Ben Kuchera puts it: While the California law would have added an exception to the first amendment to exclude certain content from protection, in essence...

I haven't been posting a lot, lately—partly because it takes so much longer to write an article by speech than it does by typing it, and partly because I seem to be sleeping a lot more lately. This broken arm is sapping a lot of my energy. I will be having an operation next Tuesday to put a plate and screw in, and after I recover from that I should be somewhat more active. With that in mind, when I do post something, it's either going to be something that I can write very quickly, or something that I...

Here are a couple of updates to the Tolkien story I did a couple of days ago: First, Cory Doctorow heard from the Tolkien estate’s lawyer that the Tolkien estate was actually not involved in Zazzle’s takedown of the “While you were reading Tolkien, I was watching Evangelion” button—Zazzle did it all on its own. According to [lawyer Steven] Maier, "Zazzle has confirmed that it took down the link of its own accord, because its content management department came across the product and deemed it to be potentially infringing." The weird thing...

At Gizmodo, Matt Buchanan looks at Apple’s recent behavior. He discusses Apple’s decision to require in-app purchase parity, and the fact that it would wipe out the entire profit margin of booksellers such as Amazon. And he wonders what the implications might be for potential censorship of books and magazines. Apple did, after all, pull a lot of “un-family-friendly” apps and appbooks from its store a while back. But on the other hand, it also sells music with explicit lyrics in the iTunes store. Under the new system, Apple may well treat published differently...