Over the last week Twitter and Facebook users across New Zealand and the world, have been blacking out their avatars in protest of S92A, a change in New Zealand's copyright law that will require ISPs to disconnect any user accused of copyright infringement. No proof or evidence is required, just accusation. This is a terrible law for many reasons, which are well documented on CreativeFreedom.org.nz, and elsewhere.
The online protest stimulated and supported a physical protest in Wellington outside the Beehive (beehive.govt.nz is a Drupal website) (NZ's parliamentary buildings) last Thursday. It inspired others to follow-up with a website blackout event today, Monday 23 February. I already partially blacked out my blog last week, however this blackout will be more thorough than my website-decolouration or 'grey-out'.
I have created a Drupal module to help any Drupal websites owners quickly blackout their website, if they want to participate. Currently it's only a Drupal 6 module, however if anyone really wants it for their Drupal 5 website and doesn't have the technical skills to backport it, I may help out with this.
The Internet Blackout NZ module blacks out a Drupal website with a link to Creative Freedom's post about the issue and event. Some pages are not blacked out, so that the module can be disabled; user, user/*, admin and admin/*. The list of pages NOT blacked out is configurable, as is the blackout page title, link, content and CSS. See the module's README.txt or the project page for instructions.
Comments
Can it be configurable?
Can it be configurable? Irish drupal users may be in need of this module very soon.
It's totally configurable.
It's totally configurable. To facilitate use by other Drupal admins in other countries it's worth creating another Drupal module with valid default settings though. The module is terribly simple, so that's a 30-minute task for someone with d.o CVS access and drupal module dev experience.
Bevan/
Bevan/