Online Protest Against PIPA/SOPA

Special Report A number of high-profile U.S. websites have "gone dark" today in protest against two bills moving through the US legislative process that threaten to damage the architecture of the world wide web and censor legitimate free speech - all in the name of anti-piracy.

People connecting to google.com from the USA will see the Google logo blacked out and a link below the search box reading, "Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web!" The link takes you to a page articulating Google's concerns about the proposed legislation.

The U.S. Google home page has a blacked out logo and a link to learn more about SOPA/PIPA

Meanwhile, Wikipedia's English-language site has gone completely dark today:

The English language Wikipedia site has gone dark in protest against SOPA/PIPA

As the Wikimedia Foundation explains:

We believe in a free and open Internet where information can be shared without impediment. We believe that new proposed laws like SOPA and PIPA, and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States, don’t advance the interests of the general public.

Likewise, the homepage for wordpress.com has the links to hosted sites blacked out and replaced with the word "CENSORED" and links to sopastrike.com/strike.

The Wordpress home page has gone dark in protest against SOPA/PIPA

The list of US websites participating in today's strike also includes: Boing Boing, Creative Commons, Copyblogger, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Internet Archive, Minecraft, MoveOn, Mozilla, Rackspace, Reddit, TorrentFreak andTucows.

PIPA/SOPA

The Protect IP Act (PIPA) [PDF] in the US Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) [PDF] in the House of Representatives both seek wide government powers to cut off revenue sources and access to credit and to shut down international websites that are determined to be infringing intellectual property rights.

The legislation would enable the US Attorney General to order search engines and other websites to stop linking to targeted sites and even order Domain Name Servers to stop resolving domain names to their associated IP addresses, based on complaints by rights-holders.

This power would go far beyond the current mechanism under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which already allows rightsholders to issue "takedown notices" to websites that host infringing content.

PIPA/SOPA encourages internet service providers (ISPs) to block websites voluntarily under a "vigilante" provision that protects ISPs from damages for unilateral bans if they act in "good faith" based on "credible evidence".

It would also give the Attorney General broad and vaguely-defined powers to go after websites that provide information on how to circumvent attempts to block access to targeted websites.