Websites blackout in protest

Largest online protest ever took place this past Wednesday

By Bruce Lilly

Wikipedia and thousands of other sites closed their doors last Wednesday to protest two new laws drafted by US legislators. Many experts conclude that the proposed laws—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its companion, the Protect IP act (PIPA)—would give corporations and the American government unprecedented powers of censorship over the internet.

SOPA and PIPA could force Internet providers and search engines to block any websites linking to content that could come under foreign copyright claims. Under SOPA, individuals and corporations could simply write a complaint letter to a site’s payment partners stating they are using copyrighted material, forcing those partners to stop doing business with that site, even if those accusations are not substantiated in court.

Because of the vague language in the bills, critics say, any websites that rely on user-generated content—such as Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia, Twitter, and more—could come under fire, forcing each website to censor and screen each of their contributors.

Wikipedia, Reddit, Google, Wordpress, Craigslist, and XKCD all believe their site would face damages or deletion if SOPA and PIPA were to pass, and each showed their opposition in some way, from using comics to wide-scale blackouts.

At midnight on Jan. 18, Wikipedia users were greeted with a shadowy black background and a brief explanation of Wikipedia’s opposition to the bill. The text read, “For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the US Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.”

Google users in the US were greeted to an interesting doodle in the same vein: The word “Google” was blacked out, and a link briefly outlining their opposition to SOPA was found under the search bar. Some websites, like the cult classic The Oatmeal, blacked out their site completely and instead welcomed viewers with explanations of how SOPA and PIPA would damage the Internet and make it impossible for their website to continue.

Robert Bennet, a senior research fellow at a think tank where many of the ideas that inspired SOPA and PIPA were created, said that “the critics [of the bill] either don’t understand what the bills do or are misrepresenting what the bills do.” Bennet does not believe either bill would cause as devastating or wide-reaching damage as critics claim.

However, Jason Harvey, system administrator of popular user-generated content website Reddit.com, concludes in his online critique of the bills that both could “hurt [startup] companies and tech innovation,” destroying Internet freedoms, all the while being impotent in actually stopping piracy.

“US citizens will still be able to use foreign DNS servers, new advertising and payment networks will pop up overseas, and ‘infringing sites’ will still be linked to by other foreign sites and search engines,” argued Harvey. “In fact, tools used to circumvent these forms of Internet restrictions are being funded by the US State department to offer citizens under ‘repressive regimes’ uncensored access to the Internet.”

“When the dust settles, piracy will still exist, and the Internet in the US will have entered the realm of federal regulation and censorship.”

Wikipedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner wrote that Wikipedia had a responsibility to showcase its opposition to both bills.

“Although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral,” she wrote in an open letter to English Wikipedia Readers and Community, “its existence is not.”

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