Internet users around the country were redirected to sopastrike.com on Wednesday, Jan. 18 as thousands of websites participated in the largest online strike in history. According to a press release on sopastrike.com, over 115,000 websites and more than 13 million Internet users participated in the strike. Around 50,000 websites including Google, Wikipedia and WordPress blacked out their websites.
The strike, which was organized by Fight for the Future, was in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, which was to be voted on Thursday, Jan. 24.
These acts are online piracy bills which are intended to “tackle the problem of foreign-based websites that sell pirated movies, music and other products,” according to an article on the Wall Street Journal Online.
Although the government has the authority to shut down U.S.-based websites that offer pirated material, this bill would allow them to attempt to also shut down any foreign-based sites that do the same by stopping any U.S. visitors and funding to the site. It would block U.S. access to private foreign sites such as Pirate Bay, uTorrent and even YouTube.
In a press release by sopastrike.com, co-founder of Fight for the Future, Tiffiniy Cheng said, “This was the largest online protest in history. The MPAA was trying to quietly force this bill through Congress, but when Internet users started paying attention, real democracy happened. This is a watershed moment in the fight against lobbyists’ influence on politics.”
The day after the strike, 36 senators openly opposed the bill. In the beginning of this year, this number was a mere five senators.
Over 30 in-person meetings with senators and their staff, attendance at over 30 town hall meetings and three street protests were also planned as part of the movement.
One such street protest was organized by the Emergency New York Tech Meetup. According to nyconvergence.com, over 2,000 people participated in the protest.
As of Friday, Jan. 20 both web censorship bills have been postponed.
“We sent the MPAA back to the drawing board,” said Fight for the Future co-founder Holmes Wilson in a press release, “but any law that lets the copyright lobby block our websites, censor our search results, or cut off our Paypal account—even going through a judge—will be soundly defeated.”
In the aftermath of SOPA, the United States has been getting a lot of international attention. Poland in particular has looked to the United States as an example. A similar strike was organized in Poland against a similar act call the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
Shivani Kanji can be reached at shivani.kanji@spartans.ut.edu.