Reddit has announced a 12-hour blackout on January 18th to protest two pieces of American legislation, SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect IP Act). The bills deal with online copyright issues and have been criticized as censorship. Representatives of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia have all spoken out against the bills, and are all reportedly considering joining the blackout.
SOPA and PIPA’s notable supporters include politicians from both the democrats and the republicans, and many traditional media companies.
They aim to control copyright issues through being able to blacklist (by having them removed from search engines, or blocked by service providers) foreign websites that illegally host copyrighted content, and by punishing individuals who break copyright law (streaming copyrighted content could result in a five-year prison sentence), and sites that facilitate these actions.
Those who oppose the bill include civil liberties organizations, technology writers, online communities, and major websites. They oppose it because they believe the bill will restrict the innovations of the internet and give too much power to politicians and copyright holders, which could easily be abused in the form of censorship and does not effectively fight piracy.Omar El Akkad wrote in The Globe and Mail that SOPA is a “blueprint for ruining the internet”.
It is hard to say what the result of a 12 hour blackout would do to the internet community. My only recommendation is, if you plan on writing that essay due on this Wednesday, January 18 “later”, do it now. It might be a bit more difficult to do so on that day.
