Fade to Black: CCD Goes Dark!

In a show of solidarity with Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, ICanHazCheezburger Network and many more against the unlawful "Stop Online Piracy Act"(or SOPA) and the corresponding "Protect IP Act" (or PIPA).. Cultural Compulsive Disorder is going 'Dark' for the 24-hour hour period between midnight January 17th and 12:01 January 19th to protest these proposed bills.





This is from Wikipedia, where you probably won't find this information January 18th since it will be in a state of total darkness for the same 24 hour period after warning everyone to get their research reports done earlier in the week, regarding the matter:


"The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engine from linking to such sites, and requiring internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for ten such infringements within six months. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement."


So in a nutshell, if passed, this Bill will allow the U.S. Government to forcibly shut down any website they feel is infringing upon the rights of the copyright holders, dole out heavy fines and even jail time to those "offenders",with no prior notice, silencing the contributors of the interwebs. Such acts of government would be in direct violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution!

Besides going 'Dark', some are going further and will be boycotting THESE corporate sponsors to the bills for the same time period or perhaps longer.

Please bear with us as we stand with the country to show our politicians and their corporate lobbyists what might occur if all of us who write, create, and blog freely are suddenly silenced by the unlawful practices of the U.S. Government.....in which case you might find the photo above in place of some of your favorite creative websites.