Boing Boing is offline today, because the US Senate is considering legislation that would certainly kill us forever. The legislation is called the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), and would put us in legal jeopardy if we linked to a site anywhere online that had any links to copyright infringement.

This would unmake the Web, just as proposed in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). We don’t want that world. If you don’t want it either, visit AmericanCensorship.org for instructions on contacting your Senator. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has more information on this and other issues central to your freedom online.

Thanks,
The Boingers

Author and Boing Boing chief Cory Doctorow is up and tweeting about the SOPA Blackout:

Boing Boing joins the growing list of sites participating in this SOPA / PIPA protest day. Wikipedia also went dark at midnight, as did WordPress. Google has blacked out their logo and linked to SOPA resources as well as a shareable petition to fight the legislation.

Over the weekend, while the SOPA backlash got the government treatment, Boing Boing announced that they would be marking their support for the protest.

Boing Boing scribe Cory Doctorow details the website’s reasoning to join the site:

Even though a substantial portion of my living comes from the entertainment industry, I don’t think that any amount of “piracy” justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the consequences of one’s actions. Big Content haven’t just declared war on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the “fun” Internet: they’ve declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors, every abused kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life is worth living despite the torment she’s experiencing, every grassroots political campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place — as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.

The contempt for human rights on display with SOPA and PIPA is more than foolish. Foolishness can be excused. It’s more than greed. Greed is only to be expected. It is evil, and it must be fought.

Another company to throw in with the anti-SOPA protest over the weekend was Raspberry Pi, makers of tiny low-cost PCs.

Doctorow responded to the weekend’s SOPA events and the importance of continuing to press forward with their protest and outrage:

Commenters have pointed out that I’ve jumped the gun here. SOPA is shelved, but not killed. It could be put back into play at any time.

Before you get too excited, remember that the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), the extremely similar Senate version of SOPA, is still steaming forward, and has to be stopped.

Thank you all for helping to save the net again.Let’s keep on saving it. Let’s kill PIPA, then use this amazing energy to build something positive: a lobby for networked freedom, that acknowledges that the net is more than a glorified form of cable TV — it’s the nervous system of the information society. Any pretense that is used to build censorship and surveillance into the network will touch every part of networked life.

Similar to Boing Boing, an accompany post from Raspberry Pi explained the company’s stake in SOPA war:

If a website like ours were to be prosecuted for linking to another site where copyrighted material was hosted, our domain could be confiscated and our IP address added to a USA-wide blacklist, even though we are UK-based and have servers hosted outside the USA – all this without legal process.

So far, so ridiculous. It’s censorship and shifting of responsibility on a grand scale. But despite a loud chorus of opposition to the Acts from legal experts, internet experts, journalists, website owners like us, human rights activists (want to publicise the next Arab Spring using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or another site that potentially infringes? You’ve just provided the powers that be with an instant excuse and mechanism to shut you down) and ordinary people who just surf the web, the Acts stand a genuine chance of being pushed through. Lobbyists like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the movie and music studios have much louder voices and deeper pockets than we individuals on the internet do; but by joining together on January 18 we hope that we can make enough of an impact to be noticed by those voting on the legislation, and by the news outlets that they read and watch.

It’ll be interesting to see who of the pledged blackoutters will still follow through with the protest now that SOPA has been shelved. As Doctorow points out, PIPA, the mega shark to SOPA’s giant octopus, is still swimming around the U.S. Senate. Guess we’ll have to wait until Wednesday to see which websites walk the walk, who was just talk, and who decided to take a knee.

"Welcome to the new Boing Boing!" Mark Frauenfelder wrote on the popular blog. Boing Boing has been one of the Internet’s most widely read blogs, as they add new items regularly to their "directory of wonderful things."

Since Federated Media head John Battelle has long been the "band manager" behind the blog, helping manage its numerous little graphic advertisements, we aren’t surprised to see his organization delivering more ads on Boing Boing. Text ads from FM’s server and the ubiquitous Google AdSense program appear alternately in the ad-dedicated right sidebar of the site.

Even better, an ad displayed by Google follows the no-holds-barred ethic of Boing Boing. As shown in the screenshot we caught, Google feels that "piercing nipples" would appeal greatly to the Boing Boing readership.

Thanks, Google! (click for full view)

The most distinct change comes in the top right side of the blog. It’s the area where people tend to look first, and a highly desirable place for websites of all kinds to place premium ads. Boing Boing is no exception, featuring a rich media ad for HP during out look.

We like the larger font size used by default with the redesign, but we will miss the classic look. Boing Boing emerged from its revamp with greater readability, and a sharper focus on monetization, but we’re sure the content will be as wonderful as always.

Still, there was serious cause for concern when the story first broke.  “Mayor of Boston bans Boing Boing,” reported Boing Boing’s own Cory Doctorow.  His post is complete with a picture bearing the words “Access To This Webpage Is Restricted” and the seal of the Mayor of Boston – not good, not good at all.

Seth Finkelstein offered a (relatively) comforting explanation, however: the ban was created by a piece of automatic censorware, which apparently objected to a link from Boing Boing to a version of Google with the SafeSearch turned “off.”  Furthermore, the ban was only temporary.

“BoingBoing should be viewable again on that network when the offending post scrolls off the main page, which should happen in a day or so,” according to Finkelstein.  “But that post itself will remain censorware’d until someone changes the phrase blacklist entries.”

So . . . who (or what) is responsible for the censorware?  Not Boston’s mayor, as it turns out, and not the city, either.  Blame for the Boing Boing ban falls upon openairboston.net, “a private, non-profit corporation created to develop, implement and operate a network to provide affordable wireless internet access throughout the City of Boston.”

Censorship did, then, take place, and as Doctorow wrote, the ban may have been enacted upon an “incredible [sic] stupid basis.”  But, as a Boston native, I’m happy to report that the city (which is just a partner of openairboston.net) was not at fault.

Boing Boing quotes one of their readers Peter Rothman:

“I don’t think Flickr should be able to get a broad patent on “interestingness”. There’s a very large number of papers in the image processing and collaborative filtering areas that all define various notions of relevance, interestingness, salience, or novelty. A specific innovative technique might be patentable, but not the general idea of computing how interesting an image or media object is to a person or set of people.”

Another comment from Slashdot:

“Don’t you just love how many of these companies go about patenting an idea (or similar idea) that is already used by the masses. This is such a joke, next thing you know (providing the patent is upheld) Yahoo will start suing folks like Amazon and our beloved Slashdot for patent infringement. Most people wouldn’t even consider patenting something that is already, to some degree, “common knowledge”. I thought the whole purpose of patenting was to protect intellectual property that has yet to be implemented or conceived. Hmmmm…I guess I’m just totally wrong in that assumption.”

In more direct terms I would say that these patents suck the big one. It sucks both that Flickr thinks that they can “own” their user’s social activity and it sucks that they think that only they should be allowed to use the concept of harnessing community activity to highlight community work on a site.

Allowing a community to be editors and allowing interestingness (which is really popularity) to determine media promotion is a central feature seen on many different Web 2.0 sites. Digg uses their user input to determine their own version of interestingness (the digg front page). They use a proprietary algorithm that like Flickr’s is based on user activity. Reddit uses user input. Sites like YouTube and Odeo highlight popular content on their sites as well based on user input, activity, etc.

Flickr/Yahoo trying and “own” the concept of interestingness is a slap in the face to every other community that is being built outside of Yahoo! and it puts the threat of legal pressure on any non Yahoo! community.

This patent application also just goes to show you how absolutely clueless the U.S. Patent office actually is. The fact that they would allow a patent application like this to move forward when it is a fundamental tool used by so many other non Yahoo companies is absurd.

I could see Yahoo applying for trademark for their term interestingness as it applies to photo search. I could even see Yahoo trying to apply for a trademark over their exact specific mixture of an algorithm. (eg. 30% of the algorithm is faves, 22% of the algorithm are comments, 12% of the algorithm is tags, etc.). But to try and “own” the concept of non Yahoo communities organizing their content is just, well patently ridiculous.

I hope that Yahoo/Flickr does not succeed with this patent because it will put a chill in the air for every other content centered internet property on the Web. I can’t imagine that they will get away with this and I’m glad to see Boing Boing and Slashdot giving this story additional exposure.

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Thomas Hawk is a San Francisco based photographer and technology writer.
He publishes the web site Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection and is also
the Evangelist and CEO of the photo sharing site Zooomr.

Several posts on Boing Boing noted how several countries employed the SmartFilter technology from Secure Computing to prevent citizens from viewing objectionable content. That technology has found acceptance among several big US firms now as well.

The blog cited a New York Times report on how Smart Filter made an impact on one Boing Boing reader’s day when he tried to visit the site from Halliburton:

Nudity at Boing Boing? Mark Frauenfelder posted about that hot topic:

The unnamed Halliburton engineer may not receive much sympathy from the community at large, since he works for a major government contractor that pays salaries out of US taxpayer dollars. The greater problem for filtering companies is context.

Blocking Google’s page translation service because of its potential for avoiding the content filter also removes the usefulness of the utility for those who have legitimate needs for it. That does not benefit anyone.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.