Google’s initiative to call the public support in the fight against controversial anti online piracy proved to gain a large audience. As Washington Post reports more than 7 million Google users from US already signed the petition by yesterday. The most popular search engine in the world, used its massive convincing power to display message to users urging them “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the Web!” The link behind the message sent users to sign a petition.
Hollywood’s decision makers presumably back the legislation that raised people’s anger, Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate. The controversial legislation would do more harm than good, and tech analysts and public alike agree that instead of stopping online piracy is going to disrupt Web the way we know it now. Even worse, the legislation threatens web’s innovative power and it could kill the online creativity.
On the other hand, Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia the humankind has seen so far, went dark in protest. For 24 hours, the English version of the website published only one darken page with the text “the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet.” Apparently, 162 million people noticed the Wikipedia protest and 8 million of them contacted their congressional representatives to urge them to vote against SOPA/PIPA. Everybody is talking about SOPA these days and even Facebook’s founder expressed his discontent about it.
As a consequence to the protest movement that spread across the web and it was pushed by trend setters and by modest but feisty websites, Washington Post reports that “leading 13 lawmakers who co-sponsored the legislation began withdrawing support for the bills.”
[ttjad]
