censorship protest

On January 18, 2012 we, S.C. Fitch Enterprises and all of our affiliates, joined three of the Internet's most popular destinations--Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist-- in a global, electronic protest of the Hollywood-backed copyright laws. Wikipedia's English-language pages went completely black at 9 p.m. PT, with a splash page saying "the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet." The online encyclopedia's blackout, intended to precede next week's Senate floor vote on the legislation, is scheduled to last 24 hours. Craigslist and Google have taken a more modest approach. Unlike Wikipedia, the sites will remain online during Wednesday's virtual protest, but the home pages now feature exhortations to contact members of Congress and urge them to vote against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate version called Protect IP. Craiglist's snarky note: "Corporate paymasters, KEEP THOSE CLAMMY HANDS OFF THE INTERNET!" Wednesday morning, Google's home page featured a big, black block over the colorful "Google" logo that dominates the page, and a stark message under the search window urged: "Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web!" Both the blacked-out logo and the "Tell Congress" line linked out to a page entitled "End Piracy, Not Liberty" with an option for users to sign a petition to Congress. National Association of Black Journalist

Some Internet companies including Facebook, Twitter, eBay, and Yahoo have expressed concerns about the bill but have not said they would join the blackout. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo wrote that "closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish." I think we all knew that the powers-that-be would eventually try to kill the world wide web as we've come to know and love it. I'm sure it's just an accident that these bills are being proposed after a year where uprisings around the world were literally started on the internet. This is a scary device to those in power and I'm sure they rue the day they allowed us to talk freely to each other. They weren't thinking about the revolution that would cause -- they just saw it as a way to sell more stuff. Oops. And now they want to rein it in. Please take the time to learn about SOPA (and its twin Senate bill, PIPA) and then call AND fax AND email your Representative and Senators tomorrow. Let's melt their phone lines and computers. We've got to use the internet while we still can to organize, fight back and stop this. The good news is the Obama administration says it doesn't support the bills in their current form (but he said that about the National Defense Authorization Act -- and then went ahead and signed it after changes that still left its most dangerous provisions intact).

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