San Francisco (ip-192.com): Wikipedia plans to black out its English language website for 24 hours on Wednesday, January 18, in protest over proposed anti-piracy legislation under consideration in the U.S. Congress.
“Today Wikipedians from around the world have spoken about their opposition to this destructive legislation," said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. "This is an extraordinary action for our community to take - and while we regret having to prevent the world from having access to Wikipedia for even a second, we simply cannot ignore the fact that SOPA and PIPA endanger free speech both in the United States and abroad, and set a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world."
Before deciding to join other websites and blogs in protest against the proposed legislation in the United States - the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives and Protectip (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate, over 1800 Wikipedians from around the world did discuss possible community actions. “The overwhelming majority of 
participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills,” says Wikipedia in a press release. “Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a ‘blackout’ of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.”
Other sites, including Reddit, Boing Boing, and the Cheezburger network of comedy sites, did already announce that they would go dark on Wednesday. Facebook, Google, Tumblr and Twitter have vocally opposed the legislation. They argue that the bills could not only require Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) to block websites that are involved in digital file sharing, it could also prevent search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo from linking to them.
“We could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site,” said Boing Boing in an announcement on its website. “So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we'd have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urges Internet users in the U.S. to call their Representative and send a letter to Congress to voice their protest against the proposed legislation.
Wikipedia plans to join other websites and go dark for 24 hours on Wednesday, January 18, in protest over proposed anti-piracy legislation. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com
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