Stop SOPA Protest Successful

Wednesday January 18th was a remarkable day for the internet. Though not everyone noticed it, there was a lot of good done. January 18 was the day of #StopSOPA. It was a worldwide day of protesting against SOPA/PIPA, the bills the US Congress wants to enact to battle piracy online. If you’re like “Woa hold up, what are you talking about?!” please make sure you click the highlighted words in this article to learn more ;). 

A lot of big names were in on the protest. Google created a petition, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg let everyone know he was against it in a status update, Wikipedia blacked out their English site and had students going crazy not knowing what happened, Senate websites went offline because of the massive amounts of people trying to contact them and people even took to the streets. In a 24 hour period of time all of the protests accomplished to get a majority of US Congress members to vote against the SOPA and PIPA bills.

So to say it was successful is a big understatement. Now, this is not the end of it. The vote was just delayed for a month. Next month they will vote again and let’s hope the vast majority is still against it. Despite all these efforts the Department of Justice today took down filesharing website MegaUpload. This was done without SOPA and PIPA in effect. Imagine what they are able to do when these bills are effected. 

What else can we do? Nothing we didn’t already do. Make sure to let people know about SOPA and PIPA. Point them towards their Wikipedia pages. Vote against political parties in your country that support these activities. The internet should remain uncensored. Also remember that piracy is not a good thing and it must be stopped too. But not this way. New business models need to arrive to counter piracy. There’s still a long way to go.