Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Quiet to protest SOPA

On January 18, Teaching Comparative will join Boing Boing, Reddit, and other sites around the Internet in opposing SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world. Teaching Comparative could never co-exist with a SOPA world.

There will be no blog entry on Wednesday.

If the proposed legislation passed in anything like its current form, I could never quote the contents of another site or even link to another website unless I was sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. In order to link to a URL on any web site, I'd have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. That would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages. Even for an old guy like me with lots of time, that would be impossible. I'd be unable to tell you about potentially valuable teaching material.

If I failed to take those precautions, my finances could be frozen and depending on which version of the bill goes to the vote, my domains confiscated.


The First Edition of What You Need to Know: Teaching Tools is now available from the publisher
The Fourth Edition of What You Need to Know is available from the publisher (where shipping is always FREE).

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