By Kukil Bora: Subscribe to Kukil's RSS feed
January 18, 2012 1:33 AM EST
Visit Wikipedia, and you won't find those extremely useful articles. Instead, a message shows up that reads:
"Imagine a World
Without Free Knowledge
For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia."
The blackout starts at 12 a.m. ET on Wednesday.
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While many major media companies are backing the bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, the tech industry fears that the bills will bestow undue power upon media companies to shut down sites that they think are violating copyrights.
Protesters argued that SOPA would render any Web site containing links, regardless of whether they are user-submitted, practically inoperable or liable to government take-down, Mashable reported.
The search engine giant Google has also announced its stand for the support of the protest. Although Google won't go dark, it will put a link on its homepage on Wednesday to explain its disagreement to SOPA and its sibling PIPA.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales opened up a discussion with the Wikipedia community as to whether it should protest the bills. They also held a vote that resulted in overwhelming response in favor of protesting the law.
"It was hundreds of people who voted. The number of people participating in the discussion was 1,800," Wales told CNN on Tuesday.
Who Else is Protesting?
According to SOPAStrike.com, the Web sites that are going dark on Jan. 18 are:
Imgur
Tor Project
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