NEWS: SOPA Internet Blackout: The Silence Was Deafening

CULTURE: SOPA Internet Blackout: The Silence Was Deafening

by Nicole Powers

Despite the fact that the sound of crickets could be heard in all the coolest corners of the web, it was an EPIC day in internet history as thousands of sites went dark to protest SOPA and its sister act PIPA.

Here's a roundup of some of the sites that voluntarily plunged themselves into a temporary dark age for the greater good:


[Wikipedia]


[Reddit]


[CraigsList]


[BoingBoing]


[4chan]


[Colihouse]


[Firefox / Mozilla]


[Moveon]


[Rawstory hit Hitler's Bunker for audiovisual inspiration]


[Tumblr]


[Wired]


[Minecraft's graphic hit the mark]


[Fark went light]


[The Funny Died at Funny Or Die]


[Google continued searching...but still made their point]


[the Electronic Frontier Foundation]

It was also a great day for activism, with over 1 million emails sent to congress via the EFF action center.



Some Senators failed to hear the call of the internet, even as their sites turned into floundering fail whales...


[Oh Noes Newt!]

While other Representatives rose to the challenge:


[KeithEllison.org]

After being bombarded by phone calls, emails and online petitions, several senators distanced themselves from SOPA, with a total of 10 withdrawing their support by day's end. Meanwhile, with many of their fave sites offline, internet lovers in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Vegas took to the streets, and members of the artistic community made their voice herd with an open letter to Washington (via Neil Gaiman's blog):

But the MPAA and much of Hollywood's old guard remained defiant, their refusal to understand the new paradigm and their determination to wage war against their greatest consumers and turn their customers and champions into a criminal class merely underlining how out of touch they are with their future sales base and the outlets that promote their wares. (One genius meme likened SOPA to dealing with a lion that has escaped from a zoo by blasting some kittens with a flamethrower, which was a pretty damn accurate metaphor.) In a statement yesterday (see excerpt below) and via multiple (and quite absurd) tweets, the MPAA explained/excused their pro-SOPA stance by blaming foreign criminals, claiming that they were taking action to defend "American jobs" (and not the movie studios' bottom lines) – this, despite the fact that SOPA would put many websites like our own – and the jobs of the people who work at them – in jeopardy.

Though many of the politicians that support SOPA, and the corporations that bought them, also remained unrepentant, the unprecedented day of internet action thrust the issue to the fore, educating many who were previously unaware of the bill and forcing the mainstream media – however unwillingly – to report a little of the Orwellian reality that SOPA would bring.

The internet, and all the freedom fighters who sail on her, should give themselves a +1 for today.

**Update**
According to Wikipedia editor Aaron Muszalski (aka @sfslim), over 150 Million people have viewed Wikipedia's blackout page!

PIPA support collapses: According to Arstechnica, 18 Senators, of which 7 are former co-sponsors, now oppose bill.

Yahoo News / Digital Trends has an excellent article which breaks down the SOPA/PIPA blackout by the numbers. It includes the following statistics:

The Los Angeles Times reports that “8 million U.S. readers took Wikipedia’s suggestion and looked up their congressional reps from the site.”

It sucks but these corporate companies have the politicians in their pockets to have this law passed. This was inevitable because no business is going to sit by while their work goes on the internet free for others.

That's not the problem SOPA and PIPA address. The problem they address is disintermediation: the phenomenon where the Internet keeps killing off middlemen between the producer and the consumer of products, including copyrighted works.

SOPA and PIPA would tend to favor large corporations with lots of money over small producers of copyrighted material, because large corporations can fight back when they are attacked using the new weapons SOPA and PIPA provide, where as small businesses simply can't afford the ongoing legal costs SOPA and PIPA would create for them.

So the actual effect of SOPA and PIPA is to stop small businesses from competing with Big Copyright (Hollywood, the big record companies, and the big publishing companies), not to actually do anything at all to stop "copyright piracy."

Sopa sucks balls...... I sure hope it dont get passed because if it does everything we worked for over the past decade with technology will be torn apart with censorship.

I think congress needs to back the fuck off and put the Sopa bill in the shredder and move on to bigger and better things like fixing our job market. more than half of the population is unemployed so lets try to fix that instead of censoring people on the internet!!!!!

A friend of mine was telling me about watching the part of congress that was discussing the SOPA and PIPA as it was brought forth. It was horror according to him.

Long story short: It was a great day of activism, a few members of Congress noticed, but not enough to stop the bills from passing.

It didn't pass- it got stalled

It was more than a few members. SOPA is down to just 62 supporters after the blackout.

Here's a comparison of supporters vs opponents before and after the blackout.

Athene also went to war versus SOPA/PIPA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-_bLo2ek-0&feature=g-all-a&list=PLE116AECFE70B4571&context=G266a848FAAAAAAAAAAA

Piss me off a lot of all such laws that are taking: S

[redacted for maithfail] Shows what a little awareness can do--and how much it's needed.

I really wish I were confident that it would be enough to actually stop SOPA/PIPA, or more importantly, the ideas they represent. (Since even if SOPA/PIPA actually go down in flames, there's nothing to stop similar legislation from being rolled out in future when people aren't paying attention any more, or passed in bits and pieces attached to more innocuous or beneficial legislation.)

Yeah, this definitely isn't a permanent fix. But one of the worst possible expressions of the desire of the media industry to keep making fat sacks of cash money due to artificial scarcityprotect artists has been blocked, and awareness of the issue has been raised. That's a lot more than I expected to happen.