"Despite all of my best efforts, the past year has been dominated by really a bitter war between Silicon Valley and the content industry," Paul Brigner said. "And it’s a shame, because a lot of it has been fueled, I think, by misinformation and exaggeration about what the MPAA and others were trying to accomplish with this legislation."

"We need more than just following the money, and addressing the search results," he later added. "There needs to be some indication that when you try to go to these rogue sites, you shouldn't be there."

The danger of dismissing your opponent's concerns as "misinformation and exaggeration" is that you might start to believe it yourself. If you believe it yourself, you're likely to continue to press your agenda without regard to the objections that are being raised.

On some level you'd think they would clue into the fact that resistance to this has grown, not shrunk, with every single concession that they've made. Their lack of respect for our legitimate concerns leads them to believe that if they just make one more concession everything will be fine, when in fact the very idea that they thought we'd have accepted the previous version is, in and of itself, extremely provocative.

"What we're left with is a very narrow, carefully tailored, narrowly targeted bill that addresses the worst of the worst online thieves, whether it's the Senate or the House bill."

We don't believe anything that you say. Circulate a draft.

On SOPA and PIPA, MPAA and Chamber strike conciliatory note - Tony Romm - POLITICO.com

Google will joining the SOPA/PIPA protest.

I suspect that Google was late to the party in order to make it clear that this is a grass roots effort and not something that they are driving.

Google will protest SOPA using popular home page | Media Maverick - CNET News

In the past 48 hours there has been some criticism of tomorrow's planned web blackout to protest SOPA and PIPA. The most widely reported was Twitter CEO Dick Costolo's "that's just silly" tweet, which members of the press, eager to report a controversy, took out of context. In fact, Costolo was responding to the accusation that Twitter lacked the "cojones" to take a stand, and was clarifying his organization's view on what sort of stand was appropriate.

However, there has been some real criticism of the anti-SOPA protest. Paul Levinson thinks that "Wikipedia should not shut down on Wednesday... [they] could make the same point by putting up a page about SOPA which everyone who goes to Wikipedia would see... it is a wrongheaded, unnecessary move, and SOPA will be defeated without it."

Lauren Weinstein goes further, writing a post that advocates using splash pages instead of shutting sites down, and then later on posting this update which questions the value of the entire protest:

I might add that apart from the discussion above, history suggests that this type of protest -- likely to flood Congressional phone lines for a day or two -- is among the least effective, almost certainly to be relegated to the category of mass mailings and other directed protests. Personal letters and other unscripted communications with Congressional representatives can most definitely have a positive impact, but politicians have learned over the decades that the high volume, organized, "call your congressman" protests tend to be the least meaningful.

It is wrong to dismiss the importance of the web blackout to protest SOPA. The purpose of the protest is not merely to generate a flood of telephone calls to representatives. The purpose is to make the American people aware of the issue and of the Internet community's concerns.

It is not a coincidence that backpedalling on SOPA from Lamar Smith, Patrick Leahy, the House Majority leadership, and the Obama Administration, as well as the first in-depth television news coverage of the issue on MSNBC, came a few days before this protest. Heretofore the mainstream television news media had done almost no reporting on SOPA, and it was easy to dismiss the opponents as a small but vocal group. After the protest that will no longer be possible, so all of a sudden people are starting to distance themselves from the bills. This is a significant set of victories.

Wikipedia's participation is hugely important as it is one of the most prominent sites that chose to participate, and it reflects a communi... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills.

Wikipedia’s community calls for anti-SOPA blackout January 18 — Wikimedia blog

Rhino trucks, narco tanks, Mad Mex-inismos? No one can agree on what to call the armored monster vehicles that Mexican criminal groups have been welding together in recent months, but this much is clear — they are building more of them.

Mexican Drug Gangs Building More Monster Trucks - NYTimes.com

A pair of bills that would strengthen antipiracy laws — and that could essentially censor the Internet, according to heavyweights like Google — have received scant coverage from the major television networks. The parent companies of the TV networks are among the chief supporters of the bills, having lobbied Congress to write them in the first place.

Those two facts, taken together, have caused conspiracy theories to flourish online about corporate interference in news coverage.

Chris Hayes and the staff of his show on MSNBC, “Up,” knew that when they invited Richard Cotton — the chief lawyer for NBC Universal, MSNBC’s parent company — and a prominent opponent of the bills, Alexis Ohanian of Reddit.com, on their Sunday morning broadcast.

MSNBC does an admirable job breaking the television news silence on SOPA. Their suppport for the bill creates visible tension in providing this coverage.

SOPA and Antipiracy Debated on MSNBC - NYTimes.com

On Jan 18th, sites will go dark to protest the internet censorship bills.

MemeStreams will be joining the strike on January 18th.

STRIKE AGAINST SOPA

Attitudes are softer when asking whether ISPs should “block access to sites that provide access to pirated songs and videos.” A 58% majority responded yes to this question, with 36% opposed.  When asked if the government should block access, that majority vanishes (40% yes; 56% no).

The Copy Culture Survey: Infringement and Enforcement in the US | Media Piracy | The American Assembly

The documents reveal that the agency is tracking media stories that "reflect adversely" on DHS or the U.S. government. One tracking report -- "Residents Voice Opposition Over Possible Plan to Bring Guantanamo Detainees to Local Prison-Standish MI" -- summarizes dissent on blogs and social networking cites, quoting commenters.

EPIC - EPIC - FOIA Documents Reveal Homeland Security is Monitoring Political Dissent

Companies from General Electric Co. (GE) to yogurt producer Chobani are adding U.S. workers, accelerating a rebound in hiring, as chief executive officers prepare for greater demand in a strengthening economic recovery...

“The next few years are going to be a different picture than what we saw in the last few,” said Hamdi Ulukaya, CEO and founder of South Edmeston, New York-based Chobani...

“It would be a stretch to say we would be able to recover to pre-recession levels by anywhere before the middle of the decade,” said Rankin, who predicts the unemployment rate will end this year at 8.2 percent or 8.3 percent.

This sounds like good news.

Hiring Logjam Breaks as CEOs Plan Growth - Bloomberg