Stop American Censorship!

Kaiser made these posts over at the spring forums and they sum it up quite nicely for non-americans:

from what i understand vidalia uses a relay of VPNs; SOPA will block all VPN and proxy traffic, and the use of such will be deemed illegal, just like china.

even though this is something occurring under USA law, it will effect all of us…

- all .com, .org and .net domains are contained in a registry in the USA, so they will be treated as within US jurisdiction for the intents of SOPA
- ip addresses in Canada, the USA and the Caribbean are allocated by a US system, and as such will be treated as domestic
- even sites that are not domestic to the USA can have their jurisdiction snatched (if somebody from the USA connects to them)
- if your website is taken down by SOPA, in order to appeal, you must first consent to the jurisdiction of the US court system (rather than the international criminal court)
- copyright reform will become part of US foreign policy as they attempt to shoehorn their system into other, weaker legal systems

they will have you by the short hairs regardless of where you live in the world. this is scary stuff, and needs to be stopped.

not sure about how exactly complaints would be handled, but from what i understand, it has to be copyright infringement related, and to do with accessibility of copyrighted material being made available on the web

so like… if you made a search engine… and somebody made a warez site that could be found on said engine… then a complaint comes in, forcing your search engine would be insta-blocked in 90% of the world, and if you wished to appeal, you consent to the authority of the united states courts and go to trial over there. your payments from paypal / mastercard etc would be permanently frozen. you also are automatically sued by the US government for making an appeal.

keep in mind this counts for the whole world; there would be nothing to force you to go to court, but at the same time, if your online business was interfered with (legitimately or not) by SOPA, then your livelihood is gone.

again, this effects the whole world. springrts.com nameserver is likely in the USA, so a single complaint against this website would probably block most of us from accessing it indefenitely.

you would do well to learn about this, because if it goes through, it’s going to change a LOT of things about the internet for the worse. (Thanks kaiser!)

and here is a link the explains the impact vs non-americans as well:
http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/11/23/60899117.html