In protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act, popular Web sites such as Reddit, Boing Boing, and Wikipedia will go dark Wednesday, displaying only a message about their opposition to the controversial bill.
What is SOPA?
At a basic level, SOPA — and its Senate analogue, the Protect IP Act — would enable copyright holders and the Justice Department to get court orders against sites that “engage in, enable, or facilitate” copyright infringement. That could include, say, sites that host illegal mp3s or sites that link to such sites (the revised House bill focuses primarily on foreign sites like, oh, Pirate Bay). Courts could bar advertisers and payment companies such as PayPal from doing business with the offending sites in question, order search engines to stop listing the accused infringers, or even require Internet service providers to block access entirely. The bills contain other provisions, too, like making it a felony to stream unauthorized content online.
- Washingon Post
(Read more about SOPA here).
Imagine a world without this:
