If you're planning to look up "United States Bill of Rights" on Wikipedia tomorrow, don't bother. The crowd-sourced encyclopedia website is protesting the US House of Representatives' Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act, by blocking access to all of its English-language pages.---
The site, which joins popular social news site Reddit, technology blog Boing Boing, anonymous web browsing software site Tor Project and others, will be unavailable from midnight Eastern time on Wednesday, Jan. 18 through midnight Thursday, Jan. 19
"The government could tell us that we could write an entry about the history of the Pirate Bay but not allow us to link to it," Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales told The New York Times, referring to the file-sharing site.
The US Congressional Anti-Piraccy Caucus estimates that online piracy costs the US film industry $25 billion annually , as SFR previously reported. The bills would enable the US government to shut down entire websites for simply containing a link to a site suspected of engaging in internet piracy, and have been criticized for threatening freedom of speech and weakening the infrastructure of the internet.
Over the weekend, the President Barack Obama administration released a statement that it would not support legislation to fight piracy at the expense of freedom of expression.
"While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response," the statement reads, "we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."
As of press time, SOPA is being delayed from introduction to the House to allow for revisions, but the Senate still plans to introduce PIPA , according to The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia's Wednesday blackout is still on schedule. Other sites are protesting in their own ways. Wordpress is providing banners that its users can display to their sites, and Google is planning one of its ubiquitous front page banners.
