A diverse crew of Internet businesses, advocacy groups, and lawmakers has banded together to create something called the Internet Defense League.
The organization seeks to save the 'Net from bad laws like SOPA. And a cat signal—modeled after the signal used to rouse Batman each time Gotham City is threatened—is what the group will use to alert the world when it's protest time.
Reddit is just one of many members in the Internet Defense League. It also includes... Mozilla, WordPress, Fark, Imgur, Tor, BoingBoing, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, [and] advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/internet-defense-league/
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who is also on the steering committee, said the fight for internet freedom is something that everyone can get behind, whether they’re liberal activists or Tea Party patriots.
“This is such a non-partisan issue,” he says. “Regardless of your political stripe, you have to concede that the open internet is a good thing for the country. The nice thing about SOPA and PIPA was that Moveon.org was there right next to the Tea Party. It was pretty much Everyone vs. the entertainment industry.”
“At a moment of notice, this kind of digital bat signal will go up in the air and you’ll get notified and have the opportunity to take action however you see fit on your site,” Ohanian says. “It could be a slew of buttons that give links to whatever we’re doing, a call to action to sign a petition, or a couple of lines of code that you put on your site that allows someone to call their senator. It will be up to the web owner to decide…. We’re trying to encourage as much from the bottom up, because that’s how the internet works.”
The group will formally launch midnight Thursday to coincide with the opening of the latest Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises, piggybacking on the very Hollywood machine that spawned the League.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...reates-cat-signal-to-save-web-from-next-sopa/
http://internetdefenseleague.org/
"This is like a call to arms for all the people who are creating something online. Whether they have a Twitter account with 20 followers, or they have a website with 35 million visitors, they all have a Gotham, so to speak, to protect. They all have a community they want to keep strong."
The organization seeks to save the 'Net from bad laws like SOPA. And a cat signal—modeled after the signal used to rouse Batman each time Gotham City is threatened—is what the group will use to alert the world when it's protest time.
Reddit is just one of many members in the Internet Defense League. It also includes... Mozilla, WordPress, Fark, Imgur, Tor, BoingBoing, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, [and] advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/internet-defense-league/
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who is also on the steering committee, said the fight for internet freedom is something that everyone can get behind, whether they’re liberal activists or Tea Party patriots.
“This is such a non-partisan issue,” he says. “Regardless of your political stripe, you have to concede that the open internet is a good thing for the country. The nice thing about SOPA and PIPA was that Moveon.org was there right next to the Tea Party. It was pretty much Everyone vs. the entertainment industry.”
“At a moment of notice, this kind of digital bat signal will go up in the air and you’ll get notified and have the opportunity to take action however you see fit on your site,” Ohanian says. “It could be a slew of buttons that give links to whatever we’re doing, a call to action to sign a petition, or a couple of lines of code that you put on your site that allows someone to call their senator. It will be up to the web owner to decide…. We’re trying to encourage as much from the bottom up, because that’s how the internet works.”
The group will formally launch midnight Thursday to coincide with the opening of the latest Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises, piggybacking on the very Hollywood machine that spawned the League.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...reates-cat-signal-to-save-web-from-next-sopa/
http://internetdefenseleague.org/
"This is like a call to arms for all the people who are creating something online. Whether they have a Twitter account with 20 followers, or they have a website with 35 million visitors, they all have a Gotham, so to speak, to protect. They all have a community they want to keep strong."