Bottom line: Take a minute and write your representative now and tell them in the strongest terms to oppose SOPA. This is a rotten piece of legislation that threatens the Internet as we know it, and could potentially pose a very real threat to your online business.

Now, put SOPA in context, and think through the unintended consequences of this legislation.

First note that there is no due process or judicial oversight in SOPA. None. If you’re accused of violating copyright, you’re effectively blacklisted at the DNS level (section 102). You’re shut down and branded a violator. It’s game over with no restart. That alone should scare the pants off of anyone doing business on the Internet today.

Next, by encouraging private corporations to create target lists (section 103), Big Media are going to serve their best interests and their shareholders by overreaching. If the history of sweeping and error-prone DMCA take-down notices are a guide, these lists will inveitably include potential copyright violators, not actual copyright violators. There is no judicial oversight. There is no court of appeals. If your site comes up in some algorightmic search–warranted or not–you’re taken off the Internet.

Now add section 104 of SOPA to the mix which indemnifies card companies (Visa, MC, Amex, etc.) and payment processors (Paymentech, Authorize.net, etc.) who cannot be held accountable if they cease processing payments to any site, as long as they have a “reasonable belief” that the website is engaged in copyright violations of any kind. The safe bet is that these massive corporations are not going to know or care if you are a legitimate rights licensor. If they so much as suspect that you are infringing, they’re could stop processing your financial transactions. Again, no recourse. No judicial oversight. Just lights out.

I’m sure there are other unintended consequences of this legislation that I can’t imagine, but my point is this: it wouldn’t take much under SOPA to shut down your site, and you would have no recourse.

SOPA and PROTECT-IP must be stopped.

What’s truly scary is how this slippery piece of legislation is skating through Congress. In yesterday’s House hearing, the house invited exactly one opposing voice to speak among dozens of proponents. The lone voice of opposition? Google. Who else has joined Google in their opposition to this legislation? Facebook,Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, AOL and Mozilla just to name a few.

This isn’t hyperbole.  I’m not advising this lightly.  I’ve done the research, and I’m scared shitless.

What can you do?

• Click here to write your representatives

Further reading:

Source:

• HR 203261 – “SOPA” House Bill
• GRA11445 – “PROTECT-IP” Senate Bill

Context:

• The Stop Online Piracy Act: A Blacklist by Any Other Name Is Still a Blacklist
• Disastrous IP Legislation Is Back – And It’s Worse than Ever
• An Explosion of Opposition to the Internet Blacklist Bill
• At Web censorship hearing, Congress guns for “pro-pirate” Google

I’m a big fan of Versions.app. On the Mac, there is no better way to manage your SVN-controlled projects.

I’m also a fan of Versions’ sister site, Beanstalk. The two work seamlessly together and make version control a breeze, especially in a team coding environment.

If you’re like me, you have a bunch of archived projects that you have to dust off occasionally when an old client calls in a panic about something or other.  At some point in the past, Beanstalk (admirably) deprecated all their old http-accessed repositories in favor of more secure ones over https.  When this happened, it orphaned any working repositories that still pointed to their old http urls.

You’ll know you’re affected when you get a message like this:

While Versions itself doesn’t have a way to relocate a working directory, it’s dead-easy to do it via the command line.  Fire up your Terminal and type:

(Obviously, change the path, “repo” and “account” placeholders with your own values.)

That’s it. Run an update and then you’re good to go.