If you tried to look up something in Wikipedia yesterday, you wouldn’t have been able to. Why? It’s the same reason Google’s logo was censored by a big black box: to protest the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), both of which are intended to combat “rogue,” foreign websites that facilitate piracy, and which the Senate will conduct a vote for on January 24th. Opponents of the bills, including Reddit, Twitter, and Tumblr, as well as Wikipedia and Google, have been protesting them for what they see as their dampening power over Silicone Valley start-ups and potential for abuse. The bills’ largest supporters, unsurprisingly, are the film and music industry.
From an information access standpoint, the bills are nerve-wracking for their vague language, which could allow big corporations to request that a site’s IP address be shut down through a court order without trial. One of the accusations against SOPA is that a site that simply links to a foreign site suspected of pirating a company’s content could be blacklisted at that company’s behest.
Sign a petition against SOPA here or read more about it here. You can also get a library perspective here.