On January 18 from 8:00 am ET and 8:00 pm ET, ArtisTech Media will darken ccMixter.org, dig.ccmixter.org and TuneTrack.net as to participate in the SOPA Strike. We strike to show solidarity with the Creative Commons, EFF, Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, and many others that promote Creative Commons licensing and sharing. If you are concerned about the freedom of the internet, in great part which makes the operation of ccMixter.org possible, we encourage you to share the SOPA Strike message through Twitter (#SOPASTRIKE) and other social media. You can read more on the SOPA Strike here http://sopastrike.com/.

“SOPA threatens every site on Internet, but would especially harm the commons, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains,” says Linksvayer of the Creative Commons, “SOPA would drastically increase both the costs and risks of providing platforms for sharing and collaboration (think sites ranging from individual blogs to massive community projects such as Wikipedia, from open education repositories to Flickr and YouTube), and vaporize accessibility to huge swathes of free culture, whether because running a platform becomes too costly, or a single possibly infringing item causes an entire domain to be taken down.”

At ccMixter.org, we all work together to make certain only original content under Creative Commons licensed is shared. ccMixter does not support piracy — and does support musicians (we are musicians)! On rare occasion, we find infringing material uploaded to ccMixter.org, and thanks to the watchful help of our administrators, editors and the entire community, we do our very best to remove it immediately. Even so, SOPA and PIPA could enable the shut down of ccMixter.org, without recourse.

Techdirt has excellent coverage of SOPA and its ill effects.

We apologize for any inconvenience the SOPA Strike may cause, and we consider the action we’re taking to be a sacrifice! Putting ccMixter.org in maintenance mode for 12 hours will greatly limit our creative experience, but we believe sends an important message.

We appreciate your support!

ccMixter Administrators

FYI if you are in the US and want to write to your congress members, EFF has a form to submit that I think will also identify your legislators. I followed a link off craigslist that took me to the EFF page.

I’ll miss ya mixter, but totally support the cause. Long live digital freedom!

Thanks for posting this important information.

good initiative, people need to know it is serious business that governments are trying to cencor the internet, and stand up for theirselves

THANKS FOR INFORMATION…

SOPA/PIPA to me is both surprising, yet unsurprising; surprising in the sense of “Are the companies behind this REALLY that clueless as to what a profoundly BAD PR move this is, let alone the countless other negative long-term repercussions?”

Unsurprising, in the sense of historical context- piano rolls, cassette recorders, VHS, DAT… this is one song we’ve all heard before- and the hysteria has been justified, lemme think… Oh, that’s right- NEVER.

I saw a great quote on a sign - it read “It is no longer an excuse to not understand how the internet works.”

You know, the day after SOPA fell, they took down Megaupload, one of the sites they claimed they needed new laws for.

Seems to me they are doing just fine with the laws they already have.