I applaud the sentiment but PM, though it is easily my favorite, is not even remotely a major forum. Now if /. or SO and any of its 60ish sub-sites wanted to join the blackout, that would be something.

PM is one of the major, well known software developer forums.

Sorry to blow your bubble, but Perlmonks is just space dust. It's unimportant in the global scale. Noone significant will have heard of Perlmonks, let alone be impressed by a blackout. Really, do you think there's an American senator or congress (wo)man who will say, "I was going to vote in favour of SOPA, but now that Perlmonks is blocked for 24 hours, I vote against it"?

Not that I expect Wikipedia going black will matter. That's as useful as wearing pink for a month in breast cancer awareness month, or sprouting facial hair in November in an effort to cure or prevent cancer or some other disease. Changing your life style or donating to research may though.

I've been saying this for 2 decades: if people keep violating copyrights, it will come back and bite you. SOPA doesn't surprise me -- that it has taken this long does. Sure, "our" community is now mighty upset about SOPA, but I seldomly hear anything constructive from the same community to prevent piracy. In fact, the community is full of people with hundreds of gigabytes of illegally downloaded music and movies. Fess up, how many of you have never downloaded a pirated copy of a movie, a piece of music, a book, or something else that should have been paid for?

[Cue the flock of people that will come with arguments that the entertainments industry business model is outdated: that's irrelevant. It's not your product, it's theirs, so they can use whatever business model they want. And then there are the people who claim "but if I really like it, I'll buy it". Yeah, sure.]

P.S. If Microsoft shutdowns Bing for 24 hours, will we give up open source?

I pay for everything. It's what I feed my high horse.

Aside from that, I agree with you and what luis.roca was implying earlier while still dismissing the idea that the legislation will do more good than harm.

Actually I think Wikipedia blackout did matter.

"I've been saying this for 2 decades: if people keep violating copyrights, it will come back and bite you. SOPA doesn't surprise me -- that it has taken this long does. Sure, "our" community is now mighty upset about SOPA, but I seldomly hear anything constructive from the same community to prevent piracy. In fact, the community is full of people with hundreds of gigabytes of illegally downloaded music and movies. Fess up, how many of you have never downloaded a pirated copy of a movie, a piece of music, a book, or something else that should have been paid for?"

Hear, hear!

It's one thing for people with some technical savvy who know where to look to pirate creative works. That kind of pirating (From Napster to Pirate Bay) while hurting copyright owners and dependent industries is not as bad as Google, twitter, facebook etc allowing their users to post and link to copyrighted materials without permission. That is what has created the urgency among the creative industry and helped lead to several waves of layoffs of over the last 10-15 years. (There are other factors but denying piracy has cost people their jobs is silly.)

The shell game Google played by making the phrase "Data wants to be free." changing 'Property' to 'Data' was smart and effective in getting the online sheeple to pass it along without further examination.



"...the adversities born of well-placed thoughts should be considered mercies rather than misfortunes." — Don Quixote

Yeah, linking shouldn't be unlawful no matter what

"I think, having the industry and press be aware that SOPA can also affect the economy of purely in-house projects (by cutting of the in-house developer from the community) is worth the effort, too."

Not sure how cutting off access for one day to PerlMonks would undermine any in-house projects. I like this site a lot too but — c'mon!

In general: Even the most ardent supporters of SOPA/PIPA have not effectively demonstrated how the passing of either law will hurt the paycheck of your average coder — (the wallets of bigger companies like Google/Facebook is another debate). Regardless of if these bills pass or not programmers will still be able to create and share code.

Not sure how cutting off access for one day to PerlMonks would undermine any in-house projects. I like this site a lot too but — c'mon!

Indeed. If I had a programmer who came to me and said "I cannot do my job, as I don't have access to Perlmonks", I'd scratch my head and wonder how he'd ever got hired.