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Wikipedia begins blackout in protest against US anti-piracy laws

English version of website goes offline for 24-hours amid anger SOPA and PIPA bills aimed at protecting intellectual property

Wikipedia has taken its English-language content offline as part of a "day of darkness" in protest at US anti-piracy laws that it says could "fatally damage the free and open internet" and "severely limit people's access to online information".

As of 5am on Tuesday, anyone trying to access the online encyclopedia will have been greeted with a blackened screen and a message exhorting them to "imagine a world without free knowledge".

"For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history," reads the message, adding that the website will still be available on smartphones and mobile devices. "Right now, the US Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia."

The legislation that has prompted Wikipedia - along with other sites such as the blog Boing Boing and user-generated news site Reddit, which will go down at 8am EST – to take such drastic action is the House of Representatives bill to stop online piracy act- known as SOPA - and its Senate equivalent the protect intellectual property act - known as PIPA.

The bills, which have been hailed by the media, film and music industries as a big step towards helping the fight against piracy, have been denounced by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, as "destructive legislation" that would "set a frightening precedent of internet censorship".

The message on the blacked-out Wikipedia site continues: "Wikipedians have chosen to black out the English Wikipedia for the first time ever, because we are concerned that SOPA and PIPA will severely inhibit people's access to online information. This is not a problem that will solely affect people in the United States: it will affect everyone around the world."

Boing Boing is even more direct, warning that the proposed legislation "would certainly kill us forever". Google, which is functioning as usual, carries a message reading "please don't censor the web!" and links to a site warning the bills will do just that, as well as "impose harmful regulations on American business".

SOPA and PIPA proposes that anyone found guilty of streaming copyrighted content without permission 10 or more times within six months should go to jail. Any site accused of "enabling or facilitating piracy" could be shut down. The bills have many heavyweight supporters in the entertainment industries, which has characterised as a battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Among the backers is Rupert Murdoch, who has lambasted the White House for indicating it would not support the most extreme elements of SOPA and, on Tuesday tweeted: "Don't care about people not buying movies, programs or newspapers, just stealing them."

On its site, Wikipedia says the bills will not be effective tools for fighting copyright infringement. "They put the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the unnecessary blocking of entire sites. Small sites won't have sufficient resources to defend themselves. Big media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for their foreign competitors, even if copyright isn't being infringed. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines. And, SOPA and PIPA build a framework for future restrictions and suppression."

Wikipedia has taken its English-language site offline as part of protests against proposed anti-piracy laws in the US.

Users attempting to access the site see a black screen and a political statement: "Imagine a world without free knowledge."

The user-generated news site Reddit and the blog Boing Boing are also taking part in the "blackout".

However, Twitter has declined to join the shutdown.

Wikipedia, which attracts millions of hits every day, is opposed to the US Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) being debated by Congress.

The legislation would allow the Justice Department and content owners to seek court orders requiring search engines to block results associated with piracy.

The site's founder, Jimmy Wales, told the BBC: "Proponents of Sopa have characterised the opposition as being people who want to enable piracy or defend piracy".

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: ''These bills are very badly written''
"But that's not really the point. The point is the bill is so over broad and so badly written that it's going to impact all kinds of things that, you know, don't have anything to do with stopping piracy."

The message replacing the normal Wikipedia front page on the internet says: "For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopaedia in human history. Right now, the US Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia."

The site was still available on mobile phones, however.

Google.com also joined the protest, blacking out its logo and linking to an online petition urging Congress to not censor the web.

Sopa's supporters in the House of Representatives say the legislation is designed to stop revenue flowing to "rogue websites". A similar bill, Pipa, is making its way through the US Senate.

On Saturday the White House issued a statement that appeared to side with critics of the legislation.

It said: "While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet."

Despite the hint of a presidential veto, Wikipedia said that the English site's administrators had decided to stage its first ever public protest because the bills "would be devastating to the free and open web".

It added: "We don't think Sopa is going away, and Pipa is still quite active. Moreover, Sopa and Pipa are just indicators of a much broader problem. All around the world, we're seeing the development of legislation intended to fight online piracy, and regulate the internet in other ways, that hurt online freedoms."

However, when asked whether Twitter would join the blackout, its chief executive, Dick Costolo, tweeted: "Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish."

In a Twitter conversation with Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales, Mr Costolo later clarified that his comment was not meant to be read as a "value judgement" about other organisations involvement in the action.

The anti-piracy legislation still has high-profile supporters including News Corporation's chairman, Rupert Murdoch.

A message by Twitter's chief executive sparked off a conversation with Wikipedia's founder
Over the weekend he tweeted: "So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery."

He later added: "Seems like universal anger with Potus [President of the United States] from all sorts of normal supporters... Whole entertainment industry employs 2.2 million [on] average salary $65,000. Good jobs and expanding foreign earnings. Made in America, too!"

Sites taking part in the shutdown went offline for 24 hours from midnight Eastern Standard Time (05:00 GMT) on Wednesday.

Most people I guess know this already but if you want to use Wikipedia disable your browsers Java-script capabilities to view the info.

SOPA is the equivalent of smashing the Gutenberg press
By Adrian Hon Internet Last updated: January 18th, 2012

The Gutenberg printing press was "the internet of its day"

One of the most important technological advances in the past thousand years was Gutenberg's printing press. As one Italian bishop put it, it would take three printers working for three months to produce 300 copies of a book – but it would take three scribes a lifetime each to complete the same number.

Yet it wasn't only the speed of the printing press that made it so revolutionary – it was its ability to produce practically perfect copies of written text. No longer would students have to worry about errors or omissions introduced by scribes working off second or third-hand copies – they could instead rest assured that their copy was as accurate as the original master.

Ideas could spread faster, farther, and with more fidelity than ever before – not for nothing does Elizabeth Evenden, a lecturer in the history of books, call the new technology "the internet of its day", with information no longer "coming purely from the pulpits or disseminated by governments."

Over five hundred years on, we can now make 300 copies of a book – and send them across the world – not in three months, but in the blink of an eye. This advance has led to the flowering of online commerce and the exchange of new and diverse ideas between people who would never otherwise have been able to talk, let alone meet. Unsurprisingly, our ability to copy information has not filled everyone with joy, since it has also led with widespread piracy of copyrighted materials.

Spurred on by big media companies, the latest effort by governments to stamp out piracy comes in the form of two bills from the US Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

According to these acts, if a US site (or a foreign site that has its domain name registered in the US) is found to be "committing or facilitating the commission" of copyright infringment, then, on the request of a rights holder, it is subject to seizure in a way that many scholars believe violates due process, depriving people of a fair hearing and suppressing free speech.

It gets worse. If the targeted site is not based in the US and thus cannot be seized, then the following actions must occur:

1) US sites and search engines must remove all links to the foreign site
2) US advertising services must no longer serve ads linking to the site, or display ads on the foreign site
3) US payment networks must cease all transactions between the foreign site and US customers
4) US service providers to block access to the foreign site via DNS blacklisting

In other words, a rights holder would be able to accuse a website anywhere in the world of facilitating piracy simply because a user posted a comment linking to a file sharing site, and the site would completely vanish from the internet. Anyone using any US-based search engine (which includes pretty much everyone in the UK) would not be able to find it, and anyone in the US would discover that typing in its URL would lead to nowhere.

It's a breathtaking grab for power and control, one that seeks to use the very same powers and technologies that repressive governments in the Middle East and China use to stamp out free speech – except here, it's purely for the interests of rights holders. Talk about destroying the village in order to save it. And since the UK often blindly follows the US in these matters thanks to global media companies and star-struck politicians, we need to keep a very close eye on it.

What makes this entire affair so tragic is that SOPA and PIPA wouldn't even dent piracy; encrypted torrents, VPNs, anonymous proxies, use of foreign DNS servers and the TOR network: all of these technologies are trivial for pirates to use, and extremely difficult for authorities to track.

Piracy is not going to be solved by the heavy hand of the law. As far as businesses should be concerned, it can only ultimately be "solved" by new business models, just as radios, record players, tape recorders, and video recorders all required media companies to figure out new ways of making money. We are not about to jump in a time machine to return to the 60s and give up the internet just because some companies can't compete.

While SOPA has been shelved for the moment thanks to a popular outcry, some speculate that this was merely a planned retreat and that its predatory spirit will live on in Pipa or other acts. As a result, major websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, have decided to continue with their blackouts today in an effort to highlight the issue and rally support against the acts. With luck, the authors of SOPA and PIPA may discover that they have stumbled across the one issue that unites internet users of every kind and persuasion.

It's ok you needn't worry now. I just went on Flickr and it asked me if I wanted to darken a picture in opposition to these laws. The howls of protest from people now unable to see a picture of the small plastic aeroplane I made should put an end to this nonsense.

Most people I guess know this already but if you want to use Wikipedia disable your browsers Java-script capabilities to view the info.

I will no longer watch any more fucking hitler memes. As per all memes, it was funny, momentarily, once, years ago. It's not funny now, and never will be again.

I will no longer watch any more fucking hitler memes. As per all memes, it was funny, momentarily, once, years ago. It's not funny now, and never will be again.

I will no longer watch any more fucking hitler memes. As per all memes, it was funny, momentarily, once, years ago. It's not funny now, and never will be again.

Holy crap, Zardoz is a meme!

Under SOPA, you could get 5 years for uploading a Michael Jackson song. One year more than the doctor who killed him.

No, memes have to at least be funny once momentarily.

Do you remember when PIPA used to be blonde and then one day, without warning, she had dark hair and a long face and had aged 15 years?

It's a natural response. It appears that the FBI indeed does have the power to shut down international websites even before any new legislation passes through the US. With that sort of power, I'd be worried too.