Tag: SOPA

I know I haven’t done much blogging at all on the Mets since the season ended but I did feel compelled to write up this posting because it effects everyone, not just bloggers. I also felt it belonged here on a Mets blog because MLB is backing this legislation – David Daniels

Here we are about 6 weeks before spring training, the winter meetings are over and baseball news is few and far between. But some of us bloggers have been monitoring a disturbing piece of legislation making it’s way through Congress right now. It’s called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and it is a bill that can take down every single blogging website caught with any kind of pirated material, including this one. It’s coming up for a vote this week!

SOPA is actually well-intentioned. Corporations, like Major League Baseball, want to prevent piracy and copyright infringement. But they do so in an overly-aggressive, innovation-endangering way. They allow the entertainment industry to censor sites they feel “engage in, enable or facilitate” infringement.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes SOPA as the “blacklist bill” because it would “allow the U.S. government and private corporations to create a blacklist of censored websites, and cut many more off from their ad networks and payment providers.”

That means the Attorney General would have the power to cut off select websites from search engines like Google. It could also cut off advertisers and payment processors like Visa from the sites. The Attorney General could essentially kill all of a site’s traffic and revenue in a matter of days.

SOPA only allows targeted sites five days to submit an appeal. That doesn’t leave much time for them to defend themselves before losing their site. Continue reading “Major League Baseball Supports SOPA”