Breanni's half-truths on the front page.
Getting people to support a cause is one thing, to lie to get people to support a cause is just plain wrong. The truth is that Warcraft Pets infringes on Blizzard-Activision's Intellectual Property, no arguing that. However it is not in the best interest of Blizzard-Activision go after the legal means to shutdown Warcraft Pets because they are mutually beneficial to each other. All SOPA-PIPA would have made the process easier by skipping some of the legal processes to get the site shutdown.
Re: Breanni's half-truths on the front page.
I have to respectfully disagree, Baldr. I did not lie or tell half-truths. I stated the following:Baldr wrote:Getting people to support a cause is one thing, to lie to get people to support a cause is just plain wrong. The truth is that Warcraft Pets infringes on Blizzard-Activision's Intellectual Property, no arguing that. However it is not in the best interest of Blizzard-Activision go after the legal means to shutdown Warcraft Pets because they are mutually beneficial to each other. All SOPA-PIPA would have made the process easier by skipping some of the legal processes to get the site shutdown.
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"You've no doubt heard about SOPA and PIPA after yesterday's Internet strike. Sites like Google and Wikipedia brought awareness about these bills to the masses. If you're still not sure why they're harmful to so many websites (WarcraftPets included), read this explanation — it's a bit technical, but you'll learn enough to make an informed decision.
This legislation has a direct impact on the gaming community. What's more, if these laws were on the books five years ago, I never would've created WarcraftPets due to the legal and technical overhead placed on web developers."
--Read the full post, published January 19, 2012
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The issues to which I was referring have absolutely nothing to do with WarcraftPets infringing on the IP of Blizzard-Activision. As you pointed out, keeping the site going is beneficial to all of us, so they have no interest in shutting us down. I never once said they did.
What I was referring to are the portions of SOPA and PIPA that require every website owner to police their own website for links that lead to copyrighted material. Such links would need to be removed by the owner, or the owner could face fines or have their site blocked from public access, effectively killing the site.
Any site that has a large user base (in our case nearly 60,000 accounts) would have tremendous difficulty policing all of the content submitted by users. For example, our site allows users to publish comments, custom bios and forum posts. We also have a private messaging system. The overhead that would come with checking all of that user-generated content for links that could lead to copyrighted material is enormous.
An alternative is to invest significant resources into developing an automated solution. Our site would have to automatically check for copyrighted material as it's posted and prevent those links from functioning or being published. Many would argue that you’d never be able to create an automated system that worked 100% of the time, even with the best programmers you can find.
The last option is to prevent people from submitting user-generated content at all, thereby greatly reducing the utility and social aspects of our site. Doing that would be like committing online suicide -– and it definitely goes against the notion of a free and open web.
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I'm sorry if I didn't provide more details on our news page explaining my arguments, but I didn't feel it was necessary to get my point across. Had you contacted me directly rather than posting this here, I would've been happy to discuss the subject with you.
Next time, I do hope you'll try talking to someone before publicly accusing them of lying and telling half-truths.
