Or gone dark. Or showing what it’s like if the free flow of cyber-information is ever interrupted. Which is apparently what might happen if a few senators in the U.S. Congress have their way. Sites like Wikipedia, Craigslist, The Huffington Post, Reddit, Tumblr and WordPress have united and “gone dark“, replacing their homepages with a black background and posting a message about SOPA and PIPA (more on those below). Other pages, like Google and Twitter, have altered their logos to be “blacked-out” or censored to join the movement.
And it’s censorship and ownership that they’re uniting to protect. Proposed laws in the United States, known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) are coming down on sites that infringe on existing copyrights. For the most part, the blackout is just for today, but the fight will definitely be raging on afterwards.
Breaking copyright laws are bad, and none of these sites are saying otherwise. However, it’s policing these copyright infringements that are causing the uproar. Basically, if you even link to a site with copyrighted material (ex. link to a YouTube clip) your entire site could be shut down, blacklisted from search engines, and have it’s funding cut.
So, if the legislation of SOPA and PIPA go through, sites that allow the free flow of information would pretty much be a thing of the past. And that’s what they’re fighting. Photo sites, video sites, resource sites – they all benefit from being an unbiased flow of info.
You can check out the full story HERE, then decide for yourself which side your on.
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