STOP was first founded in late 1998 at the URL: http://www.oocities.org/~stopcampaign/ but was followed by a two year hiatus. The site at that old URL is a cobwebbed one now. :) Why did the first campaign go stale? There was lot of controversy over the old STOP logos, many of which were edited from images based on copyrighted material. To prevent hypocrisy, the campaign was abandoned until the founder gained the insight to change STOP's policy just this year. Further improvement was needed so that STOP could truly become a "useful" website. The new policy includes the lack of a member list and the dismissal of non-original logos. Those logos may still be in effect on some websites but are now officially "retired". In the past when bandwidth robbery was not a well-known issue, STOP allowed members to directly link to the logos but now, that is no longer accepted.
We hope that the new STOP campaign will be able to serve the online community better. STOP is not responsible for any content that may be found on any supporters's websites. Mr. Nobody and Mr. Nonexistant volunteered their identities to be used in examples. We only converse with them through our imagination.
Neither the founder of STOP nor the maintainers of STOP specialize in law. What information we offer on STOP is collective and based on general conventions. The perspective from which we write from is that of the informed general public whose knowledge is based on accepted practices/concepts and experience.
