Yesterday, January 18th, was the day that many websites around the World, participated in a blackout which is basically where they would blackout their website in order to protest SOPA , the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, the Protect IP Act.
Both would destroy the freedoms we currently have on the Internet and put people in jail for up to five years for the littlest amount of what would be considered copyright infringement.
Wikipedia and Google were two of the biggest sites to participate, Wikipedia actually blacking out their entire site and Google just blacking out their logo with a link to sign a petition. The day after, it seems that the blackouts worked very well in getting people involved.
“Wikipedia, the largest Web player to block access to its pages for a full 24 hours, reports that a whopping 162 million people experienced the blackout on the online encyclopedia’s landing page. In addition, 8 million U.S. readers took Wikipedia’s suggestion and looked up their congressional reps from the site.”
Google got a whopping 4.5 Million signatures for it’s petition to stop SOPA and PIPA. Keep in mind, that was just up until 1:30PM PST so they likely had even more before the day was up. Twitter had a lot of people talking about the two bills and reported around 2.4 Million tweets in just the first 16 hours.
The popular blogging platform WordPress saw around 25,000 blogs participating by blacking out their blogs, as well as 12,500 who had a stop censorship ribbon their site.
Do you believe SOPA and PIPA will end up passing?
