Some of the biggest names on the Web are planning to show the world what it might be like if SOPA were to become law and subsequently be used to shut down bits of the Web. Wikipedia, for example, is proposing to “go dark” on January 18.

This means Wednesday is going to be a bad night for pub quiz cheats :)

We cannot pass a law in our country that would prevent the people in the neighbouring country playing Beethoven within earshot. Sound has a habit of ignoring the border, and if it’s going to interfere with my enjoyment of Chopin then rather than try to make the disturbance illegal, maybe I could just go indoors. While it is obviously silly to think that local laws have universal applicability, some still behave as if this were true. Particularly in the Internet space where we see many examples of physical territories trying to legislate for the whole Internet. It’s almost as if the individual countries believed that anything they can perceive on the Internet must be happening “in their country” and therefore [click title to read more…]