Successful Website Blackouts Anti-SOPA, PIPA protests

By on January 21, 2012 in Internet
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The SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act) may have lost is wager in the US Congress but the Senate is scheduled for an initial vote this Tuesday, this time on the equally contentious PIPA (Protect IP Act). The fight apparently has not ended, according to senate sources. This comes a few days after around 10,000 websites went offline including Wikipedia, and well in excess of 7 million surfers signed up with Google.com’s online petition lambasting the two unacceptable copyright protection bills. Advocates opposing the bill are one in saying the fight is just beginning with more work ahead.

Senate Majority Floor Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, scheduled a session vote this coming Tuesday to kill a planned PIPA filibuster, though some 20 senators already announced they would oppose this, including the six who had earlier co-sponsored the bill. Reid disclosed that supporters are crafting amendments to the bill, but no word yet about them relayed and is unclear if PIPA supporters will win the 60 required votes to overturn the threatened filibuster of two Democrat and two Republican senators.

As this developed, strategist Michael McGeary of the consultancy firm Hattery Labs, said that the work lobbying against the two bills is not yet over. At an anti-PIPA brief last Thursday he said that Wednesday’s protest was just a tipping and was “not the first day and not the last day. We’re here for the duration.”

Last Wednesday saw thousands of websites that included Wikipedia’s English version, Mozilla.org, Tucows and Reddit went black in protest against the two bills. While Google remained online, it blacked out its familiar homepage logo and asked users to sign its online petition against SOPA and PIPA with a resounding 7 million people responding, Google said on Thursday.

It will be recalled that Vermont’s Democrat Senator and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy introduced the PIPA bill last May 12 with the committee approving and sending the bill to the floor in two weeks. And in the lower House, , Texas Republican Lamar Smith who serves as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee introduced the SOPA last Oct. 26.

  • Andrew

    It was rather frustrating last Wednesday when all the websites went down, however, I totally understand why they did so and support them 100%. Any fight of this nature is always a long haul and I am sure we will see many more attempts to prove to the U.S. Legislators that the two bills are bad news and bad for the internet.

  • Timothy G.

    A lot of the supporters have withdrawn their backing from these bills, but not all of them. Everyone needs to join this effort by contacting their legislators and making it clear that anything that tries to block freedom of speech and other rights will be fought. If we don’t stand up, they’ll just slip it in somewhere else after they reword it a bit.

  • Dailytrickster

    A lot of my friends here in the UK think that this will not affect anyone outside of the USA but I fear that they are wrong, as the internet is worldwide and anything affecting websites will have a knock on effect.