Wikipedia, Reddit and Boing Boing in SOPA Protest

18 January 2012

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) is designed to allow content owners and Governments to block internet access to websites containing unauthorised copyright material by obtaining a court order.

Payment gateways, internet service providers, search engines and advertisers would be forbidden from doing business with overseas websites which have court orders against them.

Wikipedia, Reddit and Boing Boing have all taken their sites offline in protest against the proposed act

This week the White House joined the side of the critics of the legislation stating that: "While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet."

When Dick Costolo, the Cheif Executive of Twitter, was asked whether it would join the protest he tweeted, "Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish."

When your kids say "Where were you when the government made the internet lame?"
you'll hopefully respond with unflinching certainty: "raising hell." (Destructoid.com)

The following websites are also joining the protest today by either taking their sites offline or adding messages of support, like the one below, to their homepages.

    Imgur
    Tor Project
    Miro
    iSchool at Syracuse Universi
    Mozilla
    WordPress.org
    MoveOn.org
    Good Old Games
    TwitPic
    Minecraft
    Mojang
    Destructoid
    Good.is