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In protest of SOPA, NinjaScape will be "blacked out" on Monday, the 16th of January 2012 and Wednesday, the 18th of January 2012. Normal operation will resume on Tuesday, the 17th of January 2012, then again on Thursday, the 19th of January 2012. ----------
Greetings, As many of you may already know, a highly criticized and mostly one-sided debate is currently taking place in the American Congress, known as the "Stop Online Piracy Act", or "SOPA". This act not only skirts around it's alleged purpose of preventing online piracy, but in fact, both empowers it, while backtracking over years of progress in consumer security. Unfortunately, its one-sided opposing nature from the public is being met with a largely favouring position from the American Congress. SOPA will allow the U.S. Government the power to block any website from both a DNS Lookup, and eliminate it from search engine results, without needing any court order. Due to the vague nature of the bill being passed through, even so much as a blog, or forum comment linking to copyrighted or unauthorized material, can result in the owner's entire website, or server, being entirely blacked out from the Internet, without warning. Along with the above situations which can land you with severe penalties, even without your own wrongdoing, there are also several threatening proposals which could end social media as we know it. One provision as such, states that you can face up to five years jail time for posting any copyrighted work yourself, this includes, for example, a video of you singing along with a song on the radio, or say, adding a song's audio to a gaming video you've created. Not to mention, in the latter case, you can also be landed in hot water if the Game's publishing studio takes a disliking to you using content from their video game. While the above is barely tipping the iceberg of the eventual damage that SOPA and its associate act PIPA can cause to the internet as a whole, the real damage will lie in that of the economy. Tech companies, the basis for the largest industry in the world, rely on the Internet. With the introduction of the above acts, one simple copyrighted content notice received in the event of a forum user or blog commenter linking to unauthorized material can do more than block you from Google, and the American side of the web. It will also have a snowball effect on to your payment partners based in The United States, such as PayPal, who by law, will be required to freeze your account balance without warning if such a notice is received. We at NinjaScape do not support piracy, especially in the gaming industry, where indie companies such as Mojang relied on its small, dedicated user base for months, before becoming one of the fastest growing companies in the Industry. However, we do not believe that SOPA makes any such effort to prevent piracy. It is simply opening the web to censorship, and launching a direct attack on the tech industry for the sake of the entertainment business, while all the while, only requiring pirates to enter an IP address in order to get around any domain blocking, while also opening up additional security holes in allowing for DNS alteration from outside parties. The Internet as a whole is the greatest technological feat, and information asset that has ever been devised by man. NinjaScape will join sides with other major gaming and social websites, by blacking out our website in protest of this bill. In protest of SOPA, NinjaScape will be "blacked out" on Monday, the 16th of January 2012 and Wednesday, the 18th of January 2012. Normal operation will resume on Tuesday, the 17th of January 2012, then again on Thursday, the 19th of January 2012. If you have any concerns or queries regarding the above, please do not hesitate to contact us, at webmaster@Ninja-Scape.net. For more information on SOPA, see the Wiki. Kind Regards, NinjaScape Team, Webmaster |
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