Online Protest Planned For Wednesday January 17, 2012

It is being called the largest online protest in history.   On Wednesday, several groups are uniting to fight SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.

 

According to the Wallstreet Journal, SOPA would give federal lawsuit enforcement the authority to shut down websites that offer pirated content. 

The author of the bill estimates that 13% of  American adults have watched illegal copies of movies or TV shows online and the practice has cost media companies billions of dollars.

 

JANUARY 17, 2012 – The largest online protest in history will take place on Wednesday January 18, with thousands of websites, including some of the largest in the world, blacking out their front pages, putting up messages, or shutting down completely.The SOPA Strike, which is being organized at http://www.sopastrike.com, now has more than 10,000 participating websites, including some of the most popular in the world:

• Google.com
• Mozilla.com
• Wikipedia.org
• WordPress.org
• Archive.org
• reddit.com
• GetMiro.com
• Tucows.com
• OpenCongress.com
• Credo

Many other large companies are preparing actions but have not yet announced their exact plans.  The list on SOPAStrike.com will be kept up to date throughout the protest.

Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder of Fight for the Future, the non-profit which first circulated the strike idea in December, said, “At its core, this is a fight for freedom of speech, and the language in SOPA and PIPA have stepped over the line. The SOPA Strike on Wednesday is the largest online protest that has ever happened.  Several hundred million people, potentially more than one billion, will see messages about the dangers of censoring the Internet.  That is absolutely unprecedented.”  

The participation of Google and Wikipedia bring the reach of the protests far beyond any other online protest.  The idea of blacking out sites on the 18th gained momentum on Reddit.com, which has had a huge surge of anti-SOPA activism from their users as well as support from its founders.  Fight for the Future created SOPAStrike.com and AmericanCensorship.org to organize the protest. SOPAStrike.com will also provide an up-to-date list of participating websites.

About Fight for the Future

Fight for the Future is a new non-profit organization that works to defend online rights and personal freedoms.  Fight for the Future organized American Censorship Day on November 16, 2011, the largest online protest in the past 5 years, with more than 4 million people contacting Congress and companies like Tumblr and Mozilla taking unprecedented steps to drive users to contact Congress.

Links and Company Announcements

Google’s plans – http://buswk.co/AbLFXI

Wikipedia announcement – http://bit.ly/xkd9Xp

Reddit announcement – http://bit.ly/zpgUWZ

POLITICO Article on Protest Plans – http://politi.co/zXleB2