[Infowarrior] - The Berkman Community Responds to SOPA/PIPA

[Richard Forno]

The Berkman Community Responds to SOPA/PIPA

January 18, 2012

Today, many U.S. websites are participating in a blackout in order to express their opposition to pending U.S. legislation—House Bill 3261, The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and S.968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society does not take an institutional position on matters of policy. However, it encourages its faculty, fellows, staff, and community members to express their viewpoints, and invites in-depth conversations on controversial issues. Our goals are to stimulate informed analysis and to catalyze the expression of diverse opinions.

Consistent with this policy, the Berkman Center’s website is not dark today. Also consistent with that policy, many members of our community are contributing to the call for action, and others have written on this subject. You can find links to their public comments below.

As well, the Berkman Center and our community aim to track the protest and enable others to participate in the dialogue. Blogs at law offers a facility for engagement by Harvard community members at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ and has a blackout plug-in available: 

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/blog/2012/01/18/site-blackout-plugin/. Berkman’s Herdict project is tracking today’s protests at: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/herdict/2012/01/17/herdict-tracks-jan-18-sopa-protests.

---

Berkman Center co-founder and faculty director Jonathan Zittrain: 
Jonathan Zittrain, along with research assistants Kendra Albert and Alicia Solow-Niederman, wrote an analysis of SOPA that “represents our notes as we sought to understand exactly what it does and how it does it — along with our corresponding sense for why its principal mechanisms make for poor law.”: http://futureoftheinternet.org/reading-sopa

Jonathan also visited the Colbert Report to speak on the issue: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/403466/december-01-2011/stop-online-piracy-act---danny-goldberg---jonathan-zittrain

Berkman Center faculty director John Palfrey:
In December, John Palfrey published a blog post opposing the argument that research performed by Palfrey and collaborators supports the domain name system filtering mechanism mandated by SOPA: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/2011/12/22/sopa-and-our-2010-circumvention-study/

Fellows Advisory Board Member Wendy Seltzer: http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2012/01/18/keep-copyright-balance-stop-sopa-and-pipa.html

Fellows Advisory Board Member David Weinberger: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/

Fellows Advisory Board Member Ethan Zuckerman, with Berkman affiliate Joichi Ito: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/01/15/mit-media-lab-opposes-sopa-pipa/ 

Faculty Fellow Sasha Costanza-Chock, with Chris Schweidler: http://t.co/U1tVS3LO and http://t.co/jckx9sgH

Faculty Fellow danah boyd: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2012/01/17/stop-sopa.html

Fellow Erin McKeown: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da-XkA6746U

Fellow Justin Reich: http://www.edtechresearcher.com/2012/01/my-anti-sopa-letter/

Fellow Andy Sellars: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1835604

Faculty Fellow Peter Suber: https://plus.google.com/u/0/109377556796183035206/posts/QYAH1jSJG6L#109377556796183035206/posts/QYAH1jSJG6L

Faculty Associate Dan Gillmor: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/17/stop-sopa-or-web-will-go-dark

Berkman Affiliate SJ Klein: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2012/01/18/preserving-internet-freedom-protesting-sopa-and-the-wikipedia-blackout/

Berkman Alum Rebecca MacKinnon: http://consentofthenetworked.com/2011/11/16/great-firewall-of-america/

Berkman Alum Doc Searls: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2012/01/18/no-2-sopa/

metaLAB (at) Harvard: http://metalab.harvard.edu/2012/01/going-dark-sopa-wikipedia-and-expressive-absence/

Digital Public Library of America: http://dp.la/

Colleagues at Global Voices Online: http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2012/01/18/u-s-bills-could-threaten-the-global-internet/

Colleagues at the MIT Media Lab: http://blog.media.mit.edu/2012/01/media-lab-is-against-sopa-and-pipa.html

Colleagues at the Stanford Center for Internet & Society: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/


---
Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.