SOPA and PIPA are heinous US bills that could, and will if passed, deprive you of some of your most fundamental rights of information. Any otherwise legitimate website that contains a single page that infringe, or seem to infringe, on the rights of any intellectual property rightsholder could be taken down.
Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators, such as PayPal, from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites.
Source: Wikipedia.org
Think of what this would mean for user-generated content. Think Twitter, Tumblr and Wikipedia. This bill should not be made law. In protest of this bill, my website will go down for one day on Friday 18 January. Yes, I KNOW my website has about 30 visits per week and that no one cares.
Fore more information:
- SOPA on Wikipedia.
- La Quadrature du Net makes a statement (in French).
- An analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
For the tech-inclined
The page that will be displayed instead of all pages will be this one: http://minutebutterfly.de/blackout.html.
The blackout page template was retrieved from this Github project. As recommended by SEO experts, the whole website will return a 503 status code. This will be achieved using the following .htaccess file:
ErrorDocument 503 /blackout.html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/blackout.html$
RewriteCond %{TIME_MON} ^01$
RewriteCond %{TIME_DAY} ^18$
RewriteRule $ /blackout.html [R=503]
Feel free to copy and modify the files you need for your own use.
