I remember Black Thursday (which later became the EFF’s Blue Ribbon Campaign). I had had my homepage for about 3 months. It was a horrible mish mash of images I had appropiated from around the web, and a server side include that displayed a random fortune. And I had no idea what was supposed to come next. Then the fight over the “Communication Decency Act of 1996” (or just the CDA) happened. There was an out pouring of creativity, and a sense of community on the Web I’m not sure we’ve seen sense, or are likely to see again. I remember someone figured out that we could syndicate headlines by having everyone link to the same GIF, and then changing the GIF with status updates. (the earliest incarnation of RSS?) And thousands of websites went black. (including Yahoo, who was certainly the heart of the Web at that point) For me this was the first inkling that perhaps the Net was going to change the discourse in this country. That perhaps there were new modes of acting, and collaborating that could change the world, and that the Net was part of that. I was never a convert to the “Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it” starry eyed view, but there was something deeply compelling about it all. Today I can look back at the CDA, and see it as a smoke screen for the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and realize that we lost that round. But I think that fight helped put us on a road to better things.

Which is why this website is grey today, in solidarity with those showing their support for DJ Danger Mouse, in solidarity with those have received preemptive cease and desist letters (as unethical, and alarming as the preemptive arrests which have become the standard tactics of police in the last 2 years) and because I believe our current intellectual property regime is one of the foundations propping up a moribund, and repressive corporate media.