Why I’m fighting SOPA: We need a solution, but a better solution

via gigaom.com

The current SOPA legislation, which is being debated everywhere from Capitol Hill to the Hollywood Hills, is not the answer that creative rights holders — nor advocates of the DMCA and other free internet policy proponents — are seeking. Instead, we need to find a more elegant middle ground, with policy that encourages online creativity and economic growth while also protecting the intellectual property of musicians, filmmakers, and others. It’s not as exciting to advocate for a compromise, but that’s what we need.

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Protect IP, SOPA supporters vow not to give up fight

via news.cnet.com

Internet opponents of a pair of controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bills won a temporary reprieve today, when upcoming votes in the Senate and House of Representatives were postponed.

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Internet wins: SOPA and PIPA both shelved

via arstechnica.com

Just hours after Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) announced he was delaying a vote on the PROTECT IP Act, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act, followed suit and announced he would be delaying consideration of the companion legislation.

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These Websites Are Going Dark to Protest SOPA

via mashable.com

Tech companies are getting ready to black out on Jan. 18 to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sibling the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

Much has been made of Wikipedia’s promise to “go dark,” or shut down the site, for the day as a way of warning what might happen if SOPA became law. The tech protesters say that SOPA would render any site that included links, even if they were user-submitted, practically unoperable and liable to government take-down. Going dark is a dramatic but not entirely unrealistic warning of what the Internet could look like in a SOPA world.

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What Is SOPA?

via gizmodo.com

If you hadn't heard of SOPA before, you probably have by now: Some of the internet's most influential sites—Reddit and Wikipedia among them—are going dark to protest the much-maligned anti-piracy bill. But other than being a very bad thing, what is SOPA? And what will it mean for you if it passes?

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Wikipedia Will Go Dark On Wednesday In Protest Of SOPA/PIPA

via businessinsider.com

Wikipedia will pull its plug on Wednesday in protest of SOPA and PIPA, controversial bills in Congress that could seriously change the way the Internet works if they get passed.

Wikipedia's protest is sure to get some attention from those who are still unaware of the issue -- Alexa pegs Wikipedia as 6th most heavily trafficked site in the world and in the US.

Co-founder Jimmy Wales tweeted that comScore estimates that the English version of Wikipedia receives an average of 25 million daily visitors globally.

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Wikipedia to black out all 3.8 million English-language pages to protest PIPA

via digitaltrends.com

Wikipedia will blackout all 3,847,673 of its English-language articles in protest of the Protect IP Act (PIPA), according to co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Wikipedia is going black on Wednesday, January 18, to help fight the contentious Protect IP Act (PIPA), which is set to go for a vote before the Senate on January 24. The move, first reported by Neal Mann, digital news editor at Sky News, was confirmed by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the far-reaching online encyclopedia, on Twitter. Wales says the blackout was a “community decision.”

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