Imagine turning on your computer, ready to work on a school paper or project. When you finally boot up the internet and go onto Wikipedia, you are confronted with a black screen. Google also has a strange black box blocking its logo. What’s this all about?
On January 18th, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and other websites including Google went black in protest of a recently proposed bill called the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). This bill, introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, was created to stop online piracy. More specifically, this act would prevent U.S. search engines or other providers from displaying websites that violate copyright laws. Online piracy has been an enormous problem for the movie and music industries; they lose billions of dollars each year because of the illegal selling of their products off the Internet.
While the SOPA act would be good news for the music and film industries, companies like Wikipedia, Google, Twitter, and Facebook were not so keen on this proposal. For example, the SOPA bill would be extremely difficult for websites like YouTube to abide by, as thousands of videos are uploaded every day, making it impossible to monitor all of that content. The problems that the SOPA bill would create for websites like these are unimaginable, since they would be held responsible for blocking all content that violates copyrights. Protesters also claimed that censoring the internet violates an individual’s freedom, suggesting that other means should be taken in order to stop online piracy.
Overall, the protests from Wikipedia and numerous other companies may have worked; the House decided to postpone the SOPA bill.