The Internet’s largest repository of general reference material has totally blacked out its English site to stop the passage of Stop Online Piracy and Protect Intellectual Property Acts.
The two acts, SOPA and PIPA, have not even made it to the Senate floor, but have already caused public outrage. Google, YouTube, Yahoo, AOL, Reddit, TwitPic, Mozilla, WordPress and many other internet giants have protested the bills and equated them to China-style censorship.
There are those who support the protest but disagrees with Wikimedia and others on the manner of protests. Some of the Wikipedia editors have been reported to have disagreed with Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia blackout.
Robert Lawton who is a US based computer consultant and editor of Wikipedia is reported by NDTV as having said, “My main concern is that it puts the organisation in the advocacy role, and that’s a slippery rope.”
WordPress has also urged bloggers hosted on WordPress.com to use the “protest SOPA/PIPA” setting to black out pages or the whole of their blogs today. All the SOPA/PIPA protests will last for 24 hours. Twitter has also openly opposed the manner of the protest with its CEO, Dick Costolo, saying “That’s just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.”
You can learn about SOPA and PIPA from http://americancensorship.org/
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