In very good spirits, the co founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, suggested all the school going kids to finish up with their school homework early as he revealed the plan to shut down the website on Wednesday. This is being done as to vociferously protest against the controversial anti piracy bill which the US senate is debating one.
The last few months have witnessed a massive and tumultuous debate on the SOPA in the US. The organizations in the favor if SOPA, like the Motion Picture Association of America believe that SOPA is required to keep a concrete check on piracy and fight against it, organizations against the same like Google and Facebook, says that SOPA will be detrimental for nurturing innovation and will be a blow to the universal right – freedom of speech. SOPA also has other obscure provisions like blocking the websites at the DNS level itself and etc which is why giants like Google and Facebook are against it.
Wales also quoted the estimated figures provided by ComScore which says over 25 million people visit Wikipedia daily and thus the protest will has its impact on such a colossal number of people.
Though Wikipedia will not be the online website protesting against SOPA. There are several other website which will remain close in order to mark their protest against the same. These websites include – Reddit, an influential web housing and web community which works for the cause of curating news, Cheezburger network, which is an array of websites hosting very popular LOLcat memes, BoingBoing, a popular blog, Craiglist, Mozilla, Minecraft and other websites relating to the video games. Even our very favorite Google and Facebook may also join the protest and remain shut.
On Saturday, White House joined the discussion saying that certain provisions of SOPA could harm the Internet. “Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small…We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet,” said the note prepared by three senior officials, including Aneesh Chopra, the US chief technology officer. “Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cyber-security and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online.”
It has been reported that ever since White House made their stance clear, The US senate has decided to put SOPA on hold. However, that is not sufficient as fa as Wales is concerned as he said, even if SOPA does not work out, PIPA is still a threat. “SOPA is crippled now. PIPA is still extremely dangerous,” he wrote.
Don’t forget about PIPA, it’s just as important!
The more people debate, the higher Obama’s ratings go.