[Foundation-l] How SOPA will hurt the free web and Wikipedia

Wed Dec 14 07:04:24 UTC 2011

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Jay Walsh <jwalsh at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Today the Wikimedia Foundation posted an important update on how the Stop
> Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation being considered in DC this week
> threatens an open and free web, and particularly how it threatens Wikipedia.
>
> The post is authored by WMF's General Counsel, Geoff Brigham, and can be
> found here:
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/13/how-sopa-will-hurt-the-free-web-and-wikipedia/
>

"Under the new bill, there is one significant improvement.  The new
version exempts U.S. based companies – including the Wikimedia
Foundation – from being subject to a litigation regime in which rights
owners could claim that our site was an “Internet site dedicated to
theft of U.S. property.”  Such a damnation against Wikimedia could
have easily resulted in demands to cut off our fundraising payment
processors.   The new version now exempts U.S. sites like ours."

I am genuinely not anti-american. The logic here does escape me though.

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Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]