SOPA Blackout: Internet Censorship

The so-called SOPA blackout — protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA for short) in the House of Representatives and the Protect IP Act in the Senate — has spread across the web today, perhaps the most widespread online lobbying effort ever coordinated by Internet entities.

Sites checked by ABC News did not actually “go dark” as originally threatened. Instead, they posted appeals to users to get in touch with their Congressional representatives to argue against passage of the two bills.

The bills were intended to protect movie makers, music publishers and other providers of online content who fear that in the digital age, people can copy what they’ve created and spread it without paying for it. They’ve said digital pirating is a major threat to their businesses. Supporters include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Motion Picture Association of America. The Walt Disney Company, the parent company of ABC News, is among the firms supporting the legislation.

Internet companies have been complaining that the bills put them in the untenable position of having to be online police. They say they worry that the two bills could hold them responsible if users of their sites link to pirated content.

The companies said the bills could require your Internet provider to block websites that are involved in digital file sharing. And search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing could be stopped from linking to them — antithetical, they argue, to the ideal of an open Internet.

Wired.com ran a headline this morning that read, “Why We’re Censoring Wired Today” — if you could read it before most of the words on the page were symbolically redacted. (Move your cursor over the black bars and the words will reappear.)

The one headline that wasn’t blocked read: “Don’t Censor the Web. Tell Congress No on SOPA and PIPA.”