On Wednesday 18th January many sites will "go dark" in protest at the SOPA and PIPA laws which the US Government are planning to pass into law.

Sites such as Reddit, Wordpress and all English language Wikipedia pages will be taken offline for upto 24 hours, starting at midnight EST (5am UK time).

Other sites, such as Google will display a link to an article detailing it's opposition to the bill.

The firefox default startup page will be turned black and feature a "Call To Action" message.


http://www.allthingsd.com/20120117/list-of-sites-planning-sopa-protests-continues-to-grow/

http://www.sopastrike.com


Happy surfing

This SOPA thing is stupid... Just the American Government trying to take over the world again...

Good to see Nick is taking part in the protest.


I'm doing my bit by not using Twitter or Facebook for 24 hours

America is seriously bad news...i feel really sorry for people living in that 'country'

*cough*.....prison

Although some of its policies aren't ideal, I've found it a pretty nice place to live...

It's just a Stupid protest created by a stupid idea!

Why would we care as we are English it's an American thing?

If you took the time and effort you could breach any website whether they want you to or not that's not a problem!

End of Day the problem with the world is America goes to war we have to help, America does something stupid the world suffers!

I'm English and to be honest it's irrelivent why anybody outside of the USA would even care!

Shame on Nick for once again America need help and the English people have to get involved because it shows all we do is follow the orders of America just like the country has been doing for years and years and i'm sure years to come!

(That is all based on eventhing been related to America as to be honest this will never happen so that's a bigger reason for us not to care)

Maybe if you actually researched what this legislation means for everyone, and not just those inside America, then you would appreciate the seriousness of this issue and understand why millions of people worldwide are discussing and opposing the SOPA and PIPA bills.


"To summarize, both SOPA and PIPA would give the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against foreign-operated websites associated with infringing, pirating or counterfeiting intellectual property. If it becomes law, it could drastically change the way the Internet operates. For example, if a website is accused of containing copyright- infringing content, the site could be blocked by ISPs, de-indexed from search engines and even prevented from doing business online with services like PayPal."


http://www.venturebeat.com/2012/01/17/sopa-protests-go-live

Read it yourself and tell me what's wrong there????

'infringing, pirating or counterfeiting intellectual property'

I don't see a problem with these sites been blocked they are breaking the law on a different level?

Pirating is illegal, Counterfeiting is illegal, infringing can be taken on many different scales so that's different.

If I counterfit money I get arrested but you think it's alright to Counterfit somebody else intellectual work? If I pirate a film I get fined but i'm allowed to take somebody else's work as it's intellectual! Don't talk wet!

Like I said previously tho nobody cares...Look at Funkysnooker as a small scale Nick makes a change we all moan but we still come back, they make a big change we all moan but we will still log onto the Computer tomorrow!

Also just to note aswel, I used to make alot of money from Online Business's so I know the absolute value of the Internet and agreed it would be wrong to change the freedom we have, but thing need to be taken into place obviously! So what we can use Wiki my lifes not over lol Same as everything else in life we learn to adapt and move on!

Come back next year when sites like facebook get shut down because people post links to pirate software, then tell me how happy you are about SOPA.

I support laws to shut down file sharing sites and such, but these laws are too broad and can hurt legitimate websites that have been abused by 1 or 2 members, even after the owners delete the offending items or links.

Edited at 06:00 Thu 19/01/12 (GMT)

yeah, it does have far-reaching effects on everyone here.
funkysnooker is a .com-based website and could therefore be affected as well. Look at the following threads:
http://www.funkysnooker.com/thread/7742/best-goals-ever
http://www.funkysnooker.com/thread/4403/funny-youtube-video-s
http://www.funkysnooker.com/thread/1187/what-song-are-you-listening-to

These are all spreading pirated content and would thus be affected by the laws. nick would have to begin policing all the content posted here or fear being shut down.
Now imagine how much work facebook and wikipedia and youtube would have to put in to police their sites- impossible. These sites would potentially all shut down.

So yeah, I'm glad nick joined in the protest- it affects everyone, just like most changes in one country will affect other, seemingly distanced parts of the world.

Seems a pretty silly thing from how I am understanding it.

I use loads of dodgey sites, to watch films, watch football and am I liable for watching copyright infringed videos on youtube or any other site? Should be.

If this is really going to be the norm, then how many sites will actually be left? Would Google still be here? You could take turns in typing each single letter in and they'd be blank!

There will be massive disputes that will last years.

I would love to see them try close down facebook. It would go into dispute against the law which can last upto 15 years? By that time there will be something new anyway.

Seems like an impossible task to protect copyrights and now it seems to me its too far gone, to be saved.

If a site is completely guilty like the movie sites (I dont understand how they arent all blocked?) who are putting up films that havent even been released in England... if they are up and running then it makes this whole thing ridiculos.

Its not like they havent known about this for years and they should of acted sooner.

Seems like they are going to start clamping down on the wrong people. Wikipedia? Its the most reliable source of information in the world? How would kids do their homework? Haha

SOPA is wrong, and shouldn't be passed, however this "blackout" is a total load of nonsense... It's not going to help anything at all.. People are saying it was the biggest internet protest etc.. etc.. Wikipedia was the only "big" site I could find that actually blacked out completely.. Shows how much the other "big" sites really care, like Google, Twitter, Facebook?? In that they didn't join up with Wikipedia?

So basically, this big protest was just Wikipedia by themselves, and a few small sites like Funkysnooker with the odd advertisement against SOPA.. Possibly the worst protest I've ever seen in my life lol.... What did Wikipedia try to achieve? Were they trying to show how bad life would be without them by blacking out for 12 hours?

So yes, SOPA is wrong.. But the protests were very pointless.

Google, Reddit, WordPress, Twitpic, Mozilla and Minecraft also took part.

I believe the opposite about the blackouts. They were needed to spread awareness about how bad SOPA is, and if some people didn't know about it, or didn't think it was relevant to UK, then they might actually have done some basic research as a result of seeing these blacked out sites.

Edited at 11:16 Thu 19/01/12 (GMT)

I don't think they were pointless. The idea was to raise awareness- which it certainly did.
By the way, thousands of other sites joined the protest. Some of the major ones blacked out (while detailing on their page how to get around it if necessary), while others posted protest messages. google, mozilla, flickr did that- wikipedia, reddit shut down completely.

There are congressional hearings coming up in a couple of weeks- you can bet the lawmakers have noticed that significant numbers of people are against this (think reelection).

Wikipedia claims over 162million people saw their blackout message yesterday.

http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/SOPA/Blackoutpage

It's ridiculous. Going by the plans for the law you could face five years in prison for uploading a video of you singing a song owned by a label....

The power hungry American government tries it again. They are creating their own downfall. Would love to see them put the many thousands of people who own videos with copyrighted material in jail. For a country who aren't in the best financial state they are being very ambitious.

I wouldn't normally care but I don't think they quite understand the underlying side-effects there are to that new law. So many people are employed via the internet running or using sites that could be shut down if they went ahead with all this crap.

If you had an essay to do last night... you were screwed.

All this Wiki black out nonsense, HA I was using it last night

All you had to do was press escape just before the blackout page loaded and you could browse on their till your heart was content

MegaUpload has shut down.

It's a joke once again back to my origional attitude why do we care?

There are hundreds of factors to this, Youtube pays for their right to have Music Videos so that's not Copyright at all.

What your basically saying is right is Myself Photocopying Harry potter and selling it as my own? Does it matter if it's done land based or if it's done on the internet.

I made so many sucessful websites online due to theiving peoples hard work just so I don't have to waste 5 minutes coding or creating a graphic! And it's wrong but we do it as nothing can happen! So from my point of view I think it's about time people who did the work are the only one's able to be recognised for it.

Maybe I am way of, maybe it's because I don't think this will ever happen or maybe it's because America are asking us to do something and I can't stand them telling us what to do anymore I don't know!

But to me it's irrelivant it won't effect my life and somebody ealier mentioned Facebook LOL! You don't need to be on Facebook to live day to day! Also as Virt says it might decrease the National Average for Education when we can't take anybody elses information!