I don't understand this fascination with internet petitions. Hasn't it been demonstrated to the point of absurdity that our government does not care?
Before anyone claims "OH, so we should just do nothing instead????". Posting a dubious e-signature to an internet petition does nothing. There are people out in the streets sleeping in parks getting pepper sprayed and arrested because the government can't simply ignore it (unlike every single internet petition).
Filling out a whitehouse petition is like getting punched in the face by your boss then slipping a folded piece of paper into the complaint box he put in the break-room next to the donuts.
Every time I've voted on a whitehouse.gov petition, I've gotten an email 6 months later saying why the petition will be completely ignored, answering none of the points the petition brought up.
The petition system is an ineffectual smokescreen.
I expect that this petition will be just as effective as all the others.
What is SOPA and why should you care about it?
Short serious video: http://youtu.be/1ngRPuXpCIw
Long sarcastic video with a British accent: http://youtu.be/JhwuXNv8fJM
Everyone is mentioning how petitions don't work, which I agree with.
(Sidenote: I think it is an extra step worse that the government put up a website for petitions, and still ignores their own system. Random petitions (e.g. "\signed" forum posts) are one thing, but this is more like toying with people.)
That said, I think this petition has something important that other whitehouse.gov petitions don't: in that, under SOPA, there is actually technically a possibility that the government would censor itself (via whitehouse.gov), which is pretty funny if you think about it.
Edit: I suppose I mean "funny" in a darker sense.
I created an account in order to sign this, but when I try to sign in I get a 404 -- using Chrome. Anyone else get that?
The WH petition system is to political activism what Twitter is to people's social commentary... effectively redirect everything to /dev/null and make them think they've made their voices heard (although I think that this particular one is quite clever).
For all the discussion about worthless Internet petitions, it should be noted that the White House form is specifically set up to at least elicit a response if a certain threshold is reached. The threshold was originally 5,000 signatures but was raised to 25,000 after the White House responded to pleas for information about extraterrestrials. If they gave a response to that arguably silly request, it is reasonable to think they will at least respond to this one.
See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45176460/ns/technology_and_scien...
I'm in Canada, and I've realized that SOPA would damage me too, since the domain would be removed from the DNS. People here are suggesting calling their representatives, but which one should I call? Would they even bother listening to someone, who ate the end of the day, is not going affect their chance of reelection? I'd still like to be able to do something since SOPA and Protect IP are quite horrible laws.
I disagree, although I'll sign it. A petition should be created to not only stop SOPA but demand INTERNET FREEDOM laws. This will make it impossible to present any SOPA without repealing the law as there's a direct conflict.
Otherwise there'll be another attempt at SOPA after outrage fatigue. And there had been many before.
Petitions don't work. The Founding Fathers knew that...
Not a chance. Election is coming up and we're talking about 100s of millions of dollars of contributions from the entertainment industry. He'll sign it.
On the other hand, if he veto's maybe we can make up the difference. I'd be happy to contribute to a president who is a proven proponent of internet liberty. I just don't have the bankroll of the hollywood execs. Maybe some of the recent internet billionaires can fill in the gaps.
I like the tactic the petition used by even if they took the time to treat it seriously this is the only 2 outcomes...
1) The petition gets removed for containing infringing content
or worse...
2) The government moves towards removing imgur.com because it is doing the hosting of the infringing content
I know, I know its absurd, but who really believes that that link can bring down whitehouse.gov?
I received another letter from the white house. I am going to say it now. whitehouse.gov is BS. It is complete and utter bs. You are lucky if an intern looks at it, probably just a pre-canned response to any media whatever. All these petitions say is "bla bla bla write me some bs"
We need a better methodology.
Can't sign in or register in Chrome 15 ?
Every time I've tried logging in with an existing account to sign anything I've always gotten a 404 after.
Guys, the link doesn't load properly if you have Ghostery enabled. I'm not sure what WH.gov is doing to load that petition from another domain via JS, but disabling Ghostery makes things work OK.
Something shady going on with this petition? I logged in - first time every looking at it - and it says "You've already signed this petition."
???
I didn't realize that anyone could create petitions on WhiteHouse.gov. Were it not for the casual writing style, I might have thought this was an official petition from the White House.
8k votes... that is just sad...
Our government showed us many times that they don't give a shit about these petitions.
how do I make an acc? I dont see a form!
I was on a conference call w/ Zoe Lofgren (CA congress woman who is on the Judiciary fighting the hell out of this bill) and a bunch of NYC tech companies last weekend and she said petitions are essentially ignored, and instead to make phone calls to your reps and directly into the capital.
This isn't to say don't sign this, but if you are really concerned, the absolute bottom line is phone calls. Anything you can do to funnel phone calls in is what counts.
Edit: Let me add this, which makes it absurdly easy: http://fightforthefuture.org/