It may seem like it, but the fight is not over, we still need to protect our online freedom from the US government. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a United States bill introduced by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. Provisions include the requesting of court orders to bar advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with infringing websites, and search engines from linking to the sites, and court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to the sites. The law would expand existing criminal laws to include unauthorized streaming of copyright material, imposing a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

Today I found this Hitler on SOPA video. This is by far the funniest and best anti-SOPA thing on the internet.

On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia, Reddit, my company’s website N4G and an estimated 7,000 other smaller websites coordinated a service blackout, or posted links and images in protest against SOPA and the Senate bill, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), in an effort to raise awareness. In excess of 160 million people saw Wikipedia’s banner. A number of other protest actions were organized, including petition drives, with Google saying it collected over 7 million signatures, boycotts of companies that support the legislation, and a rally held in New York City.

I worked fast and in 10 minutes designed a blackout webpage for N4G and our other Newsboiler sites:

The reaction to us blacking out our sites for a day was really positive and it raised a lot of awareness to SOPA and PIPA and hopefully some of our users got involved in signing the petition.

Find out more about SOPA here.