Internet Sites Go Dark to Protest Anti-Piracy Bills

Students counting on Wikipedia today to help them finish papers or prep for exams are out of luck. The online encyclopedia’s English-language site has gone dark for 24 hours as part of a Web-wide blackout to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (HR 3261), or SOPA, a bill being considered by the U.S. House of Representatives, and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (S 968), or PIPA. Both bills have come under heavy fire from the tech industry and from Internet-freedom advocates because they would make it possible to shut down Web sites that link to unauthorized content. That puts sites with a lot of user-generated content especially at risk.

Many Web sites joined Wikipedia today in going dark, including the Internet Archive, Wired.com, and Reddit. Boing Boing put up a “503: Service Unavailable” page. Google censored its own iconic logo with a black bar. One site, The Oatmeal, has an especially funny/irreverent take on the protest, asking readers to “please pirate the [expletive] out of” the animation it posted today to mark the blackout. “This is what happens when you make the Internet mad,” The Washington Post said in one of many mainstream-media reports on the blackout.

A number of higher-ed sites joined the protest with blacked-out screens and links to more information about SOPA and PIPA. The School of Information Studies at Syracuse University made its Web site and blog dark for the day. “The iSchool is taking a strong stance on this issue because a free and open Internet is critical for growth and innovation in the areas of study that we focus on,” it said. MediaCommons, an online scholarly network, announced it was offline for 24 hours “in protest against legislation that threatens our ability to explore new forms of scholarly communication.” The Association for Computers and the Humanities blacked out its home page with a “Stop SOPA!” notice, which also turned up on the digital-humanities DH Answers site and elsewhere. The CUNY Academic Commons posted a notice telling readers that “these bills, intended to curb online piracy but excessively overbroad, threaten the existence of sites like the CUNY Academic Commons that allow people to share information on the Internet.” The home page for Baruch College’s blog network greeted visitors with an information page about the controversial bills, and the MIT admissions site also went dark for the day.

Have you seen other higher-ed sites participating in today’s blackout? Did you black out your own site—or do you think the reaction is overblown? Let us know in the comments.