There is a general assembly scheduled for today at 2 pm. Feel free to come and join us.

Hi All,

Since we are no longer physically Occupying the State House, we have equipment stored that we no longer need. The storage unit is pretty well packed, and we need to clear it out.

The plan is to meet on Sunday, February 12, at 10 a.m. to organize it and clean whatever needs cleaning. Then, at 2 p.m., we’d like to have a pot luck to celebrate the reuniting of owners with loaned equipment.

There are plenty of tarps and blankets looking for their owners. There is also a surplus of cooking equipment, including pots, pans, and utensils.  Plenty of other miscellaneous stuff abounds.  The goal is to reunite owners with equipment from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with those willing to help organize arriving at 10 a.m. and those who’d like to re-connect with other Occupiers (as well as their stuff) arriving at 2 p.m. with whatever food they care to bring.

Any equipment left over will be considered donated, and may be stored at a volunteers’ space, sold at a yard sale, or donated to a worthy charity.

The storage unit is at 617 Devine St., between Gadsden and Pulaski streets.  It’s near Thirsty Fellow (a block away, across the railroad tracks).

Please contact Carl Sorenson at 218.368.2127 or Tim Liszewski at 919.264.6403 for more details, and to volunteer to bring food or clean equipment.

There is a General Assembly tonight at the State House at 7 p.m. We’ve all been bird-dogging and helping in Myrtle Beach and Charleston, but now we should re-focus on what Occupy Columbia can do.

OccupyWallStreet

Is on strike to protest SOPA

What is SOPA?

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is a bill introduced into the House of Representatives in October to give law enforcement and copyright holders additional tools to prevent copyright infringement, backing off another bill, PIPA, both seeking to protect corporations from the theft of imaginary property.

How are SOPA and PIPA attacking the Internet?

SOPA section 103 and PIPA section 4 require payment processors and ad networks to shut down accounts if they receive the right kind of letter from a copyright owner — a system modeled on the heavily criticized notice-and-takedown provisions of the current Digital Millenium Copyright Act that requires a service like YouTube to pull down infringing content after the copyright owner complains.

SOPA section 104 offers legal immunity to ISPs that independently block websites that host illegally copied material without any prompting from the government. That’s a major conflict of interest for a huge ISP like Comcast, which also owns NBC — there would be nothing stopping Comcast from blocking a foreign video service that competes with NBC if it could claim it had a “reasonable belief” it was “dedicated to the theft of US property.” And indeed, Comcast is among the companies that support SOPA.

Now, you may have noticed that while all these rules are totally insane, they’re all at least theoretically restricted to foreign sites — defined by SOPA as sites with servers located outside the US. That’s important to know: at its simplest level, SOPA is a kneejerk reaction to the fundamental nature of the internet, which was explicitly designed to ignore outmoded and inconvenient concepts like the continuing existence of the United States. Because US copyright holders generally can’t drag a foreign web site into US courts to get them to stop stealing and distributing their work, SOPA allows them to go after the ISPs, ad networks, and payment processors that are in the United States. It is a law borne of the blind logic of revenge: the movie studios can’t punish the real pirates, so they are attacking the network instead.

Source: http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/22/2648219/stop-online-piracy-act-sopa-what-is-it

How SOPA and PIPA affect YOU?

PIPA

• Force U.S. internet providers to block access to websites deemed as enablers of copyright infringement
• Seek legal action by suing search engines, blog sites, directories, or any site in general to have the black listed sites removed from their website
• Will be able to force advertising services on infringing websites, and those supporting of them, to remove them from their advertising accounts
• Companies will also have the power to sue any new websites that get started after this bill is passed, if they believe that they are not doing a good job of preventing infringement on your website

SOPA

• The U.S. Attorney General can now seek a court order that would force search engines, advertisers, DNS providers, servers, and payment processors from having any contact with allegedly infringing websites
• It will allow private corporations to create their own personal hit lists composed of websites they feel are breaking their copyright policies, ironically this doesn’t have any odd feelings of a legal mafia at all. These companies will be able to directly contact a website’s payment processors a notice to cut all off payment involvement with the targeted website. This payment processors and website of question will then have five days to act before it is simply taken down.
• Payment processors will have the power to cut off any website they work with, as long as they can provide a strong reason of why they believe this site is violating copyrights

Source: http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/how-sopa-pipa-can-affect-you/

So, as far as the .org site being taken down, I’m going to have to claim (accidental) responsibility. While testing one of my sandbox HTML/PHP experiments with a private post that wasn’t supposed to attach, it seems that the script did indeed attach. I went through and manually deleted the plugin that was created through the script via FTP, which has been deleted. My bad on this one y’all, and my apologies to everyone! The site will remain up indefinitely.

Regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) blackout, OccupyColumbiaSC.org will remain active because South Carolina is one of the core primary states in during the Presidential Election process. However, Occupy Columbia has blacked out its Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/OccupyColumbia) which will return at midnight.
-Ren

Jesse Jackson will be at Benedict College at 11 a.m., and is interested in talking with Occupy Columbia. We’re meeting at 10:30 at the corner of Hampton and Harden streets to walk as a group to Benedict.

Sorry for the late notice, but we post things as we learn about them.

A reminder: General Assembly is today at 7 p.m. at the State House.

At the January 6 GA, we voted to have three GAs each week. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 p.m. were the days agreed to.

This Saturday’s GA will be held later in the day to accommodate the Critical Mass Rally.

10AM  GEN. ASSEMBLY (announcements)
[Facilitators: Bradley Powell and Gregory Karr, Secretary Ashley Thomas]

·      Open house

11AM – 12PM  MISCELLANEOUS and SIMULTANEOUS HAPPENINGS

·      Teach-ins

·      Sign making / waving

·      Poets

2PM  The “This Is What Democracy Looks Like” MARCH

March starts from State House, separate groups break off, to rejoin at some point on Main Street, then altogether march up Main St to SH.

3PM  CRIME SCENE THEATRE
Attendees will surround the statehouse holding crime tape while a list of crimes/abuses/wrongs are read aloud.

4PM  SPEAKERS

GENERAL  ASSEMBLY (strategy session)  (Time TBD)
[Facilitators David Arroyo and Ashley Blewer, secretary Ashley Thomas]

Devise ONE, SIX, and TWELVE month plans for S.C. activism