One of the ways in which the free Internet is being shut down is frivolous copyright lawsuits against bloggers. Keep in mind I don’t support Ron Paul; though of all the politicians I know he comes closest to my position, he’s still miles away from me. Nonetheless, I support the academic standard of quoting reasonable portions of outside material for non-profit use on the Net. So this copyright troll attack is not simply illegitimate, but willfully evil.
I tend to agree with Mike Rivero on the issue that Righthaven can’t expect to make much money this way. Thus, it is far more likely this is part of the silencing of free thought and comment, a backdoor censorship project.
More importantly, I agree it’s critical we start looking at ways to prevent them touching us. Eventually TPTB may manage to shut the Net down, but this attack by increments calls for resistance by increments. In times past, I have played at getting free accounts on servers outside the US. Particularly Unix-type stuff, but you can do it from Windows by learning how to use PuTTY as the way to access a shell account and run your own mini-website. I once had a blog composed of simple static HTML webpages, and after a page got above a certain size, I rotated in a fresh page using a simple template. Then I added new articles at the top like regular blogs by simply editing the file.
There are lots of other ways to do this, and I would hope there would be a market, so to speak, for offshore havens of that sort in the future.
Update: This business of whacking Righthaven LLC and their primary client, Stephens Media (the name is variously reported), is going viral. See this post on using a Firefox site blocking addon and the list of affiliates who are in on this nasty business.
