{"id":10287,"date":"2013-02-11T23:42:06","date_gmt":"2013-02-12T04:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=10287"},"modified":"2013-03-21T13:48:37","modified_gmt":"2013-03-21T17:48:37","slug":"goodbye-to-go-daddy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2013\/02\/11\/goodbye-to-go-daddy\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye to Go Daddy (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(I had planned to publish this post and its second part in January 2012. For reasons that will become clear in the second part, it took over a year to complete the process I began in December 2011. \u2014 A. D. C.)<\/em><\/p>\n

The Halt Lead the Blind<\/strong><\/p>\n

Things can move quickly in the legal sphere when it involves intellectual property. Not only that, but IP-related legislation, both actual and proposed, all too frequently imitates Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock<\/a>‘s fictional young nobleman by passionately\u00a0“riding madly off in all directions.” This makes it (a) hard to keep up, and (b) difficult to determine and pursue a consistent, principled set of policies in relation to all of this.<\/p>\n

As my readers know, I’ve long supported the basic premises of copyright law, having found them essential for my own survival as an independent\/freelance writer, subsequently redefined as a “content producer” and a “maker of intellectual property.” As a journalist and scholar, I also recognize the necessity of the “fair use” exception to the copyright law, which enables a reasonable amount of quotation on my part from the work of others (and, even-handedly, a comparable amount of citation of my work by others) for the purposes of analysis, commentary, and parody.<\/p>\n

\"public<\/a><\/p>\n

And I have no dispute with the copyright law’s eventually transferring copyrighted IP (including mine) to the public domain, where it becomes available for use by all without restriction, after a period of time during which its maker and his or her heirs and assigns get to enjoy the benefits of its creation. (Indeed, I found the prescribed copyright period sufficient in the period preceding the “Sonny Bono” extension<\/a> thereof.) However, while I think the Digital Millennium Copyright Act<\/a> (DMCA) constitutes overkill in some regards, I’ve found from direct experience<\/a> that invoking it almost instantly terminates online piracy of my own IP; some such instrument, therefore, seems necessary for the protection of myself and others from the thieving magpies infesting the web.<\/p>\n

SOPA\/PIPA: Just Say No<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since I find the DMCA entirely adequate for those purposes, I don’t see the need for the Stop Online Piracy Act\u00a0(SOPA)<\/a>, which to my way of thinking constitutes not just overkill but the equivalent of turning a blindfolded Dick Cheney loose with a loaded shotgun \u2014 a menace to society.<\/p>\n

\"Stop<\/a><\/p>\n

By contrast, an alternative bill,\u00a0the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, takes a much more sane, measured approach to the problem of online piracy andinfringement. Co-sponsored by\u00a0U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and U.S. Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), this bipartisan House\/Senate draft deserves serious consideration. Click here for a PDF of a draft, “Fighting the Unauthorized Trade of Digital Goods While Protecting Internet Security, Commerce and Speech,”<\/a> intended as the basic for public debate of this bill, and click here for\u00a0keepthewebopen.com<\/a>, a remarkably savvy site set up as a forum for debate about this bill, including software that enables proposing revisions to specific clauses, as well as commenting on its components.<\/p>\n

The initiation by the bill’s creators and sponsors of such a forum, with its invitation to participate in the bill’s making, shows an understanding of both the unique capacities of the web as a tool for social change and a respect for the populace that uses that tool and helps it evolve. With that act, these legislators demonstrate that they’re ready to earn the trust of the wired world \u2014 exactly the opposite attitude from that of the crafters of SOPA and its supporters (including Go Daddy), who take the position that they know what’s good for us.<\/p>\n

\"Lamar<\/a>

Lamar Smith, Official Portrait, 112th Congress<\/p><\/div>\n

Masterminded by Republican Congressman Lamar Smith,\u00a0SOPA empowers both the U.S. government and copyright holders to seek court orders against any and all websites associated, even if unknowingly, with infringing, pirating, and\/or counterfeiting intellectual property \u2014 even if they only linked to an infringing site.\u00a0I’d be disinclined under any circumstances to take seriously any web-governance guidelines devised by\u00a0a 64-year-old Tea Party and NRA endorsee\u00a0from cow-country Texas and his DC cronies. Having read the present draft of the act carefully, I can say with confidence that, crafted as it was by Foggy Bottom geezers like the toupee-wearing\u00a0Smith, clueless (as the hearings revealed) about even the basic workings of the interwebs, SOPA promises to create far more problems<\/a> than it endeavours to solve. (The fact that Lamar Smith has been outed as a serial copyright violator<\/a> himself doesn’t exactly engender confidence in his bona fides.)<\/p>\n

Understandably, therefore, SOPA has raised a storm of opposition. Indeed, it’s so ineptly devised that the Obama administration has issued an unqualified denunciation of both SOPA and the equally dangerous\u00a0Senate version of this bill, called the Protect-IP Act or PIPA<\/a>. (See\u00a0David Kravets’s January 14, 2012 report in Wired<\/em>, “White House Blasts Internet Blacklisting Bills.”<\/a>) The administration’s rejection of both bills severely embarrasses all those involved in their making \u2014 which was done, I remind you, at substantial expense to the taxpayers.\u00a0Here’s a partial list of those\u00a0websites and organizations that oppose SOPA-PIPA<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So it was with considerable chagrin that webmaster John Alley and I learned that Go Daddy (godaddy.com), the web-hosting service and domain-name registrar we used for this and our other sites, and for all our domain-name registrations as well, had come out in favor of SOPA-PIPA. Here’s the statement Godaddy filed with the House<\/a> on behalf of SOPA.\u00a0This resulted in a boycott<\/a> in which Go Daddy customers transferred over 100,000 domain-name registrations from the company in a matter of days. That mass migration began on December 22, when the U.S. House Judiciary Committee responsible for SOPA (and chaired by Rep. Smith) released a list of companies that have publicly expressed their support<\/a> for the legislation \u2014 almost without exception titans of the media and entertainment industries.<\/p>\n

Go Daddy Blinks<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Godaddy<\/a>While we were giving thought to switching to another hosting service and registrar, this boycott, and the threat of massive further customer migration, led Go Daddy to reverse its stance and\u00a0officially withdraw its support of SOPA<\/a>\u00a0on Dec. 23, effectively apologizing to the internet community for approving it in the first place and promising to endorse revisions of this legislation, or any similar bills, only “when and if the Internet community supports it” \u2014 which, knowing the “Internet community” as I do, will happen on the proverbial chilly day in the hot place. A few days later, Go Daddy formally announced its opposition to SOPA<\/a>, with this short statement in its forum from\u00a0Warren Adelman, Go Daddy\u2019s newly appointed CEO:<\/p>\n

Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.<\/p>\n

\"Go<\/a>

Go Daddy founder and ex-CEO Bob Parsons<\/p><\/div>\n

This reversal of position and act of contrition would seem to resolve the matter, though some of the departed domain-name owners, including Wikipedia<\/a>, swear they won’t be back, and others still intend to leave Go Daddy, partly out of understandable distrust in Adelman, and also as a consciously punitive measure.\u00a0As Jeff Gamet at The Mac Observer<\/a><\/em> put it, “The fact that Go Daddy helped craft the bill\u2019s current wording hasn\u2019t helped the company\u2019s case, either.” A loosely organized boycott took place on December 29, with tens of thousands of transfers out. Given that Go Daddy \u00a0is the registrar for over 32 million domain names, the migration \u2014 which I’ll estimate at 100,000 \u2014 represents a mere drop in the bucket. (In fact, Go Daddy took in more domain-name registrations during those days than it lost, leading John P. Mello, Jr. of PC World to announce on December 30 that\u00a0“‘Move Your Domain’ Campaign Against GoDaddy Flops,”<\/a>\u00a0hardly the case if it forced a mortifying public reversal of corporate policy.)<\/p>\n

However, a number of major websites \u2014 including Wikipedia, Reddit, and Boing Boing \u2014 along with 10,000 others declared a 24-hour blackout on Wednesday, January 18, 2012<\/a>, and followed through on that symbolic action. As a consequence, U.S. congressional and senatorial supporters of both SOPA and PIPA began to run away from these bills<\/a> just as fast as their little legs can carry them, starting with\u00a0Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who’s actually disowning a piece of legislation he himself had co-sponsored. Talk about egg on your face; this doesn’t look good for the newbie getting groomed as the Republicans’ poster-boy Hispanic.<\/p>\n

\"SOPA-PIPA<\/a>

SOPA-PIPA protest screenshots, 1\/18\/2012.<\/p><\/div>\n

On Jan. 18 the New York Times<\/em> reported<\/a>,<\/p>\n

With the growing reservations, a bill that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously and without controversy may be in serious trouble. Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader and Democrat of Nevada, has scheduled a procedural vote on the Leahy version for early next week, but unless negotiators can alter it to satisfy the outraged online world, no one expects it to get 60 votes.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI encourage Senator Reid to abandon his plan to rush the bill to the floor,\u201d Mr. Rubio wrote. \u201cInstead, we should take more time to address the concerns raised by all sides, and come up with new legislation that addresses Internet piracy while protecting free and open access to the Internet.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Shouldn’t this right-wing Floridian Speedy Gonzales cop to his central role in creating this fatally flawed bill and hustling it\u00a0through the Senate, instead of pretending that this is all the doing of Harry Reid \u2014 not coincidentally, a Democrat? This was a classic case of “We’re from the federal government, and we’re here to help.” and it has Rubio’s name and modus operandi all over it. You can run, little Speedy, but you can’t hide.<\/p>\n

And indeed, on January 20, 2012 Harry Reid in the Senate and Lamar Smith in Congress tabled the vote on both bills<\/a>. In short, it died in committee \u2014 with the taxpayers having funded both its production and the days spent touting it by the witless Lamar Smith and his co-sponsors.<\/p>\n

(Part 1 I 2<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

This post\u00a0supported by a donation from\u00a0the Estate of Lyle Bong\u00e9<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This boycott, and the threat of massive further customer migration, led Go Daddy to reverse its stance and officially withdraw its support of SOPA on Dec. 23, effectively apologizing to the internet community for approving it in the first place and promising to endorse revisions of this legislation, or any similar bills, only “when and if the Internet community supports it” \u2014 which, knowing the “Internet community” as I do, will happen on the proverbial chilly day in the hot place. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13],"tags":[77,80,156,211,238,380,435,437,474,494],"class_list":["post-10287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-technology","category-intellectual-property-2","tag-bob-parsons","tag-boycott","tag-digital-millennium-copyright-act-dmca","tag-go-daddy","tag-intellectual-property","tag-obama-administration","tag-protect-ip-act-pipa","tag-public-domain","tag-sen-marco-rubio","tag-stop-online-piracy-act-sopa","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}