In protest of antipiracy laws being considered in the United States, Wikipedia has taken offline its encyclopaedia in English for 24 hours. The encyclopaedia stated that the legislation considering being passed in the United States could, “Damage the access people have to information on the internet and potentially be fatally damaging.”
Anyone who visited the site on Wednesday was greeted by a screen which would simply ask them to imagine a world where information was not free. The encyclopaedia is still available on mobile devices for people you really need to look something up. Other prominent websites on the internet including Reddit and Boing Boing have also been taken down in protest of the legislation.
The bills the website are protesting against are SOPA, which is the bill going through the House of Representatives, and also PIPA which is the equivalent of the bill passing through the Senate. On the other side of the argument the music and film industries have said that this is an enormous step forward in the protection of intellectual property rights on the internet.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia has stated, “This legislation is nothing more than dangerous and destructive, if it would pass it is a frightening precedent of where the internet is heading.” This is the first time that Wikipedia has ever been blacked out and the blackout has occurred as it will remind people of what it would be like to lose access to a large amount of information on the internet.
It is important to remember that this legislation would not just affect those in the United States, but would extend internationally because of the nature of the internet”.
Google has not shut down its operations for the day but it has put a message in place on its homepage saying that the internet should not be censored. The company also highlighted the fact that this legislation would do harm to American business.
The legislation states that if anyone in the United States is found to be downloading copyrighted material more than 10 times in a six-month period than they should be sent to jail. The legislation also states that any website encouraging piracy should be immediately shut down.
The support for the bill is a significant because of the entertainment industries backing. Rupert Murdoch has been an outspoken supporter and he has been critical of the White House for not supporting the bill in its entirety. Critics of the bill have stated that it will be an ineffective way of fighting copyright infringement.
If the legislation passes, website owners will be responsible for the content that users upload and this will mean small websites will be unable to employ the manpower to do this and so their sites will be shut down in their entirety.
Additionally, websites from outside the United States could be blacklisted meaning that they won’t be visible when searching in major search engines. Furthermore, the legislation sets out ways for further limitations to take place in future.
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