Would be interesting if SOPA happens at least to me and other developers outside the USA that are forced to see 'the USA as most important western market' at the time due to the single consistent mass if the US games industry gets shot down with such massive weaponry and basically gets bombed back into a 'china from the past' state where the rest outside of the USA basically ceases to exist at will of corps that already made enough money through previous anti competitive decisions from US courts and senate.

Would be an all new level of censoring beyond anything thats already applied in the day to day business against US citizens

this has become such a pr stunt for these studios.. if anything, I've lost respect for them.. To the public they try to look like a responsible group, but they hide behind the ESA blanket which wholeheartedly supports SOPA.

This has to be the least problematic issue in the entire bill. DNS blacklisting would stop the average Joe from reaching a particular site, but if someone wants to access the site bad enough they'll get to it with or without the assistance of DNS. Having said that, for whatever reason it'll probably make a lot of people happy that DNS blacklisting is not a part of SOPA any longer. These people don't understand SOPA.



As for sites blacking-out for twelve hours...who really cares? So Mojang is going to go dark for twelve hours. All they'll be accomplishing is pissing off their customers for no reason. They offer a service that is non-essential for day-to-day life on the Internet. Same with every other site taking part. Namely: reddit. In their case, they'll just drive people to other sources for reading. Remember when Digg was the big thing? Now reddit, which is just a duplicate of Digg, is the big thing. When reddit goes away, another social networking site will take its place. Blacking out is only going to hurt them. At best, people will just be annoyed and then they'll be able to reach the site a few hours later. For what purpose? We're at the point where if you don't know or care about SOPA then you probably never will.



For these blackouts to truly be effective you'd need big players like Google and Facebook to blackout...sites that everybody uses every day and not having them would severely impact businesses far and wide. Or even just blacklisting IPs from Washington D.C. from accessing these services would get the same point across. After all, they aren't blacking-out to let me know about SOPA, they're blacking-out so that members of Congress will also be affected...like Congress reads reddit and plays Minecraft...and will see what impact SOPA could potentially have on their own lives. Sites participating in the blackout that are not U.S. based makes even less sense. Or are they just afraid of losing the business of U.S. based customers? If that's the case, then it's sorta hypocritical if you ask me. The entire world is critical of the U.S. but our money is still good...



Anyway, it would be the epitome of hypocrisy if Google or Facebook were to take part in this to "raise awareness" because let's face it...Google and Facebook will never in any way be affected by SOPA. They will never be at risk of being shut down and/or DNS-blacklisted(even though that's gone now). So for them to blackout would just be a PR stunt "to raise awareness" for their own products and services. Besides, Google would never blackout unless Microsoft blacked-out Bing during the same time period. And Facebook won't do it unless Google+ is also taken offline.



From what I've seen on the Internet lately, it is the people who have the loudest voices in opposition to SOPA that understand the least about it. And to be perfectly honest, RoW should have no voice on this one. Unless of course people want to take this same fight to China once this SOPA ordeal is done.

It's a nice gesture by Rep. Smith but ultimately pointless. SOPA has become just another opportunity to throw hate at something. As with the "Occupiers," there's a small, articulate contingent that actually made the effort to study the issues, surrounded by a much larger mass of hipsters who show up any time there's a chance to publicly revile other people.



I give it no more than three weeks after SOPA is forgotten that there'll be some new threat to the ability to steal copyrighted stuff over the Internet for the takers of the world to oppose loudly.



To be clear: I'm inclined to oppose SOPA myself on principle. The Federal Register is already bloated beyond anything the Founders could have imagined in their worst nightmares of bureaucracy; it's hurting businesses and we don't need more of that. But SOPA is far from being as cut-and-dried a piece of Pure Evil as the pilers-on claim. Even if imperfect, it at least attempts to address the real problem of people thinking it's OK to steal stuff just because it's easy to clone ones and zeroes. If the anti-SOPA protesters were serious, they'd condemn theft and try to come up with solutions themselves instead of merely opposing the efforts of others.



Because if you just oppose any attempt to solve the problem of digital content theft, and never even acknowledge that this behavior discourages the creation of new forms of IP (much less try to help figure out a workable solution to this behavior yourself), then yes, you are part of the problem.

Lengthy posts. Blah blah blah. This law is insane. Politicians are stupid. There I didn't need 5 paragraphs!

Doesn't really affect us Europeans yet but I'm sure the UK will catch up soon enough. I say bring it on. Maybe it'll help projects like mesh networking and p2p DNS finally hit critical mass.