Some 7,000 Websites Going Dark Tomorrow To Protest Efforts By Congress To Regulate The Internet

Thousands of websites – including some giants like WordPress, Wikipedia and Reddit – will be going offline tomorrow in a protest aimed at pressuring Congress from dropping bills in Congress aimed at regulating the internet to prevent piracy.

The bills are the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act.

An estimated 7,000 websites are planning to go dark Wednesday as part of a mass protest against a pair of controversial anti-piracy bills — and opponents of the measures say the number is likely to increase.
A mix of watchdog groups, content creators and grass-roots activists on Tuesday touted the planned mass Internet blackout as the largest online “revolution” in the U.S. to date.
The online protest is aimed squarely at lawmakers pushing the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and comes with a message: back off the bills or face the wrath of the same Internet community you’re trying to regulate.
“Tomorrow will be a big day of action,” said Tiffiniy Cheng, director of fightforthefuture.org, which is organizing the blackout. “The fight will continue until we get the final say from members of Congress that these bills will be dropped, and we’ll start from the beginning on how to balance protection of copyright with expression online.”
Wikipedia, Reddit and WordPress are among several sites that have already committed to going black Wednesday.

Here’s a video explaining the issue:

<p>PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.</p>

Essentially, SOPA and Protect IP would give the American government the power to censor the internet. The idea is that they would use this power to block access to sites facilitating the transfer of illegal downloads by forcing IP’s to block domain access, etc., etc. But the language in these bills is so ambiguous that, really, we’d be left having to trust that we wouldn’t see some mission creep into the government blocking access to other websites based on less clear-cut motivations.

Like, say, political motivations.

The laws also do away with existing protections for people like me who run online forums. The status quo is that those who host websites aren’t necessarily responsible for any illegal content that is posted as long as they’re responsive to requests to take it down. Under SOPA, access to sites like Say Anything could be turned off without even a request being made to take down the offending content.

I don’t condone online piracy. As a capitalist, I respect the rights of those who produce movies and music and other works to use that intellectual property how they wish up to and including profiting from it. Online piracy is a real problem, but these bills go too far in fixing it.