Wikipedia
I know it doesn't feel like it now, but please believe me: There are worse things than losing access to Wikipedia — even temporarily.
For example, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (aka H.R.3261) could become a law. The anti-piracy bill, which goes before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, makes the streaming of unauthorized content a felony. Which is all well and good, but as the Electronic Frontier Foundation warns, the bill's "vague language would create devastating new tools for silencing legitimate speech all around the Web."
SOPA is staunchly opposed by free speech and digital rights advocates, as well as top Internet portals such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia. In anticipation of the hearing, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is conducting a straw poll to gauge Wikipedian interest in a community strike — a blackout of either the U.S. Wikipedia pages, or even the entire site. So far, 87 percent of respondents are in favor of a strike.
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Why such a strong anti-SOPA turnout? Despite its authority in the U.S., SOPA has international ramifications. Websites that run afoul could be de-indexed by search engines, blocked by Internet service providers, and blackballed by payment processors such as Visa or PayPal as court-ordered by the U.S. Attorney General.
Here's a worst-case scenario free speech supporters say is entirely possible: Proxy servers such as those that aided the Arab Spring are also used to stream content that qualifies for copyright infringement. Shut down the proxy server for a SOPA violation, and the voices of protest could be muffled as well.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation breaks down more big beefs with SOPA:
SOPA gives individuals and corporations unprecedented power to silence speech online. Under SOPA, individuals and corporations could send a notice to a site’s payment partners, requiring those partners to cut the site off — even if the site could never be held liable for infringement in a U.S. court. Since many sites depend on this revenue to cover operational costs, even one accusation of infringement could be ruinous. SOPA gives the government even more power to censor. The Attorney General can “disappear” websites by creating a blacklist and requiring service providers (such as search engines and domain services) to block the sites on the list. SOPA uses vague language that is sure to be abused. The bill targets nearly any site that hosts user-generated content, or even just has a search function, by failing to provide protections for legal speech. SOPA would not stop online piracy. The powerful tools granted to the Attorney General would present major obstacles to casual users, but would be trivial for dedicated and technically savvy users to circumvent.
Wikipedia's dog in this fight is its parent organization, Wikimedia, "a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge."
What's more, Wikipedia is a community-edited entity that exists on the Internet, and as with any website, is subject to abuse. An accusation of infringement under SOPA — a copyrighted photo or other such content, could mean no more Wikipedia for anyone. (Then how are you going to come off as super-informed at the drop of a hat?)
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Will a Wikipedia blackout stop SOPA, the way it led the Italian government to back off on a law that would infringe on its editorial independence? Jimmy Wales thinks so:
My own view is that a community strike was very powerful and successful in Italy and could be even more powerful in this case. There are obviously many questions about whether the strike should be geotargeted (U.S.-only), etc. (One possible view is that because the law would seriously impact the functioning of Wikipedia for everyone, a global strike of at least the English Wikipedia would put the maximum pressure on the US government.) At the same time, it's of course a very very big deal to do something like this, it is unprecedented for English Wikipedia.
Wales emphasizes that this is a straw poll only, and not a vote that will decide such a strike. "Even if this poll is firmly in 'support' we'd obviously go through a much longer process to get some kind of consensus around parameters, triggers, and timing," he writes.
via Venturebeat
More on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+.
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Jimmy Wales, Presidente Emérito de la Fundación Wikimedia, preguntó a los usuarios de Wikipedia sobre la posibilidad de cerrar el sitio. 

Como protesta contra el proyecto de ley SOPA (en inglés ''Stop Online Piracy Act'', 'Acta de Cese de la Piratería en Línea'), las empresas Google, Facebook y Twitter, así como Amazon.com y Wikimedia, planean cerrar sus sitios el 23 de enero, un día antes de la fecha límite para la aprobación de dicha ley. La protesta se da debido a que se realizaría el cierre de sitios sospechosos de piratería sin investigaciones previas.

Previamente, Jimmy Wales, Presidente Emérito de la Fundación Wikimedia, preguntó a los usuarios de Wikipedia en inglés sobre la posibilidad de cerrar el sitio como protesta contra el proyecto de ley. Además de Wales, otras personalidades que se oponen a este proyecto de ley son Sergey Brin, cofundador de Google; Eric Schmidt, ex Presidente de Google; y Vinton Cerf, considerado uno de los "padres" de la Internet.

Otros cibersitios que cerrarían ese día son Yahoo!, Foursquare, la Fundación Mozilla, AOL, eBay, Etsy, PayPal, LinkedIn, OpenDNS y Zynga.





=== Protestas anteriores ===

En noviembre, la plataforma Tumblr cerró intencionalmente su servicio a los usuarios, quienes tuvieron la opción de comunicarse con sus respectivos Representantes para expresar sus preocupaciones, generando casi 90.000 llamadas.

Las protestas contra SOPA fueron dominantes en diciembre, cuando más de 37.000 dominios de Reddit fueron transferidos como protesta contra la empresa registradora de dominios Go Daddy, la cual revirtió su apoyo inicial por SOPA tras el descontento de multitud de sus clientes.



=== Proyecto de ley ===

SOPA es un proyecto de ley que extiende las competencias del Departamento de Justicia de los Estados Unidos y amplía las capacidades de los titulares de derechos de autor para combatir el tráfico en línea de contenidos y productos protegidos, mediante la restricción al acceso a empresas que brindan un servicio de facilitación de pago, la restricción en los motores de búsqueda que vinculan con tales sitios y el requerimiento de los proveedores de Internet para que bloqueen el acceso a tales sitios.


El proyecto de ley también tiene partidiarios, tales como 3M, Adidas, Burberry, CVS (en inglés ''Computer-controlled Vehicle System''), News Corporation e ITIF (en inglés ''Information Technology and Innovation Foundation'').

"El objetivo de SOPA son las ciberpáginas extranjeras que venden medicamentos falsificados y copias robadas de películas de Hollywood ... ''no'' cibersitios estadounidenses como YouTube o tu blog favorito", escribió Richard Bennett, investigador sénior de ITIF, para ''New York Post'', expresando la necesidad de esta ley. "Los criminales de Internet que venden medicamentos falsos o películas pirateadas simplemente se instalan en China o en una lejana república insular, a sabiendas de que no se verán acosados ​​por la policía, independientemente de cuántas vidas o puestos de trabajo estadounidenses pongan en peligro".



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