DD gave us a heads up yesterday that Wikipedia was going black today. If you’ve been spinning around the Internet today, it is pretty dazzling to see the sites that have joined them:
- Google has placed a black band over it’s iconic doodle.
- Mashable hasn’t gone dark, but they have refocused much of their content to SOPA.
- Craigslist is dark, with an opportunity to take action on SOPA.
- Moveon is also dark, with opportunities to take action.
- BoingBoing has a 503 notice.
- Wired.com has censored itself today (until you mouse over the black bars).
There’s lots more — people are changing their Facebook and Twitter profile pictures in coordinated protest, and circulating a petition from Google asking Congress to stop piracy, not the internet.
I hope that lots of you have taken the time to be a part of this action today — especially targeted at our own delegation. Chris Coons is still a PIPA co-sponsor (while both PIPA and SOPA so-sponsors are dropping like flies), and made his case for being a co-sponsor at an event in Newark this morning:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB5XhwOrsuo[/youtube]
Did you hear that? Senator Coons is riffing off of the genuine problem (and fear) of cybersecurity to justify a piece of legislation that is meant to crack down on the piracy of intellectual product (basically movies and music). It is sleazy, but counts on you not knowing what the issues are. Cybersecurity is a big problem, but these bills don’t really get to that. Piracy has been a problem forever and content providers simply have not kept up with technology in figuring out how to lockdown their property. Since we are supposed to be in this age of austerity, I’d think that people like Senator Coons would point out to the entertainment industry that they are making more money than the US Government, so they are in a much better position to protect their own property than the Government is.
I don’t know how Carney or Carper think about these bills — but am hoping that all of you are reaching out to all three of them today to ask them to step away from SOPA/PIPA and work on legislation that appropriately combats piracy without breaking the internet.