In protest against proposed legislation in the House and Senate that threatens to seriously damage the free and open Internet, EPL Talk will go dark today between 8am and 8pm ET. The same applies to our Twitter news stream.
EPL Talk will be joining thousands of websites across the Internet tomorrow in an anti-SOPA blackout. The proposed legislation in the US — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US House Of Representatives, and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the US Senate — threaten privacy and free speech online. For a detailed technical overview of SOPA and PIPA, read this post on Reddit.
The SOPA and PIPA legislation has important implications for soccer blogs and soccer fans, especially those (like this one) that link to videos of goal highlights. If the laws are passed, it could make it very easy for rights owners to shut down websites like this one and others. Watch the above video to learn more.
Tell Congress to stop the SOPA bill now. Or learn more today.
Much respect gaffer for joining the blackout.
Great job Gaffer! SOPA and PIPA need to be stopped. No one wants government censorship of the internet.
Will miss you tomorrow, but you are doing the right thing.
Thank you so much for joining the protest. This proposed legislation is a travesty and the mainstream US media isn’t covering the story because so many of those outlets support the proposal. So anyway that the message can be disseminated is fantastic.
can’t speak for all the major news networks but CNN and NPR certainly have been reporting it.
also, Obama has already come out and said it would veto the measure if it passed congress and even if it somehow got passed a veto it is practically unenforceable as no single gov controls all of the DNS servers.
They’ve only started covering it in the past week or so while the legislation has been moving forward since November.
The DNS is only a small part of it. More disturbing is making it a felony to use copyrighted music or images on Youtube and overturning Net Neutrality which will let people charge you more to access certain sites or slowing down your bandwith so that sites load slower. (If you have Time Warner Cable, for example, trying to load a Disney owned ESPN site might take two or three times as long, you may be denied access to it at all, or you may be charged additional fees for trying to access it). The blocking of international sites will affect online commerce, especially PayPal and Ebay. And most importantly, a site can be shut down without any notice or due cause just because a corporation claims their images/music/etc is being used without permission. It gives the control of the internet over to major corporations with little to no checks and balances. Some of the companies that support SOPA include Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, the RIAA, and the MPAA.
Oh, and Entertainment Arts, they who make FIFA, FIFA Superstars, FIFA Street and others supports SOPA/PIPA.
Good on ya!
They were supposed to meet tomorrow about this to shut it out but the meeting was pushed back
Check out google and Wikipedia
Outstanding! Thank you. I’m proud to be a member of your community. We stand together.
Good work guys, the more people hear about this the better.
Thanks everyone for your kind words, support and patience. Today was the first day EPL Talk has been down (on purpose) in our 6+ year history.
If you’re curious about which companies support SOPA, which includes ESPN, take a look at this list: http://gizmodo.com/5870241/presented-without-comment-every-single-company-supporting-sopa-the-awful-internet-censorship-law
Cheers,
The Gaffer
“on purpose”, nice one – I respect your decision Gaffer.
Stick to sport and stay out of politics…or at least go read the bill for youself to see you’ve been played by Google, Facebook and the new breed of corporate greed
Rich, do you work for one of the entertainment companies or lobbyists who supported the bills?
Cheers,
The Gaffer