Washington: Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, and some other popular websites have converted their homepages into virtual protest banners early Wednesday to protest against Internet piracy legislation that is being considered by the U.S. Congress.
The online encyclopedia, the tenth most popular website in the U.S., shut down most of its English-language services and replaced its familiar white and gray design with a black homepage featuring information about the bills. Known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), the legislation—backed by major American media companies—would allow the Justice Department to seek a court order requiring U.S. search engines to scrub certain results from the sites, among other antipiracy measures.
“This bill is poorly constructed, quite dangerous and won’t actually address the real problem of piracy,” said Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, in an interview. “Internet policy shouldn’t be set by Hollywood.”
The Wikipedia blackout affects its English-language site for users around the world, but the versions in other languages and versions formatted for mobile phones continue to operate.
The protest was joined, too, by search giant Google Inc., which didn’t shut down its site, but around midnight covered most of the logo on its U.S. homepage with a black box, and added a link asking users to tell Congress “please don’t censor the web.”
What are SOPA and PIPA?
SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” and PIPA is an acronym for the “Protect IP Act.” (“IP” stands for “intellectual property.”) In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet.
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