Tomorrow's "Web strike" is still on

On Sunday I mentioned that many Web sites were "going on strike" on Wednesday, January 18th, 2012, to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) under consideration in, respectively, Congress and the Senate. Since that time, Congress has shelved further consideration of SOPA - but it's still possible that it might be resurrected, perhaps even attached to another bill about something completely different and 'rushed through' before interested parties have had a chance to be heard. The Senate is scheduled to bring PIPA to a cloture vote on January 24th.

It appears that the Web sites organizing the "strike" are going ahead with their protest, in order to convey to the Senate the overwhelming opposition of the Internet community to this legislation, and also to convey to Congress that it would be unwise to attempt to resurrect SOPA by stealth and attach it to unrelated legislation in an attempt to ram it through quickly and without fair notice. Politico reported today that some 7,000 Web sites have announced that they will "go dark" on Wednesday, and that number is likely to grow.

I'm joining them, because I think this is a vitally important cause (as I discussed in my earlier article). Tomorrow this blog will contain no new posts, except for one drawn from the Sopastrike.com Web site, giving further information about this issue, plus a related video clip. Normal blogging will resume after midnight on Thursday, January 19th, 2012.

I invite all my blogger friends to join this protest. We need to stand together on this issue.

Peter