This Wednesday, January 18, Wikipedia is going offline for 24 hours in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). While Wikipedia announced that only the English version of the site will be offline, it could effect almost 25 million average visitors.
Along with Wikipedia, big Internet names like Reddit, WordPress, Mozilla joins the black out protest.
So, what is this Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) all about? Before checking all those Facebook statuses, Twitter for SOPA, check it out this short video by Fight For the Future.
SOPA and PIPA are two versions of the same anti piracy bill. The bill call these sites as ‘Rogue sites’ and the US Chamber of Commerce in a letter to the editor of the New York Times called – "Rogue Web sites that steal America’s innovative and creative products attract more than 53 billion visits a year and threaten more than 19 million American jobs." Here the popular torrent site ‘The Pirate Bay’ is a prime example of a foreign rogue website.
While much of the Internet industry and large percentage or Inernet users are against to this SOPA, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn wrote a letter to key members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, saying SOPA poses "a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation’s cybersecurity."
Visit Stop American Censorship for more information and further steps to make your voice heard! Let us know your thoughts on this new bill in the comment section below.
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