These Websites Are Going Dark to Protest SOPA Wednesday ~ Pare News

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Tech companies are getting ready to black out on Jan. 18 to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sibling the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

Much has been made of Wikipedia’s promise to “go dark,” or shut down the site, for the day as a way of warning what might happen if SOPA became law. The tech protesters say that SOPA would render any site that included links, even if they were user-submitted, practically unoperable and liable to government take-down. Going dark is a dramatic but not entirely unrealistic warning of what the Internet could look like in a SOPA world.

The blackout is a way to get the two bills into the mainstream by showing people outside the tech industry how their everyday lives could be affected by the bills. Wikipedia isn’t the only company shutting its digital doors according to SOPAStrike.com. It has a (as far as we can tell) full list of the blackout participants.

SOPAStrike.com also has a dizzyingly large list of sites “rumored” to be going dark though take these entries with a grain of salt considering Twitter and Facebook are both on the list despite saying they will stay online. The site also has resources on how to black out your own site including plug-ins and code such as Zachary Johnson’s STOP SOPA.

CloudFlare, a startup dedicated towards protecting and optimizing websites, has rolled out its own Stop Censorship app that makes it easy for website owners to temporarily black out portions of their sites.

Will the black out make any difference to the fight against SOPA? Would it matter if big companies like Wikipedia and Mozilla had dropped out? Sound off in the comments.

SEE ALSO: Where Do SOPA and PIPA Stand Now?

Image courtesy of Flickr, alancleaver_2000

More About: blackout, PIPA, Politics, protest, reddit, SOPA, wikipedia