Patternfish is against the American Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), and supports the blackout enacted by some sites today to protest them. We ourselves are not joining the blackout because we do not imagine that each one of our almost 400 publishers would happily forgo the revenue loss associated with such an act, and we cannot act without everyone's unanimous consent. Nevertheless, we are against these acts. This article does an excellent job of explaining why: http://c4sif.org/2011/12/great-overview-of-the-problems-with-sopa-by-cory-doctorow/

It may seem odd that we-- a site devoted to intellectual property rights, and a fairly simple one at that-- should be against something intended (at least nominally) to protect them. But careful reading of these acts reveals a far-too-broad distribution of immense powers which would brutally damage the Internet we know and love, and hobble or eliminate a lot of sites everyone knows and loves.

We are based in Toronto, Canada. We admire the United States and most particularly the principles on which it was founded. It ill befits such a great country to enact laws more suited to totalitarian dictatorships than its own fine traditions of freedom, diversity, and tolerance.