Wikipedia, Reddit blackout sites to protest SOPA

^{Editor's note: Story altered at 2:08 p.m., Jan. 18 to more accurately reflect content of story.}

Anyone working on last-minute papers today will have to find another source of free information: For the first time in its 11-year life, Wikipedia's English-language pages will be offline until midnight.

The user-generated encyclopedia announced plans Monday to join Reddit, a social news site, and other sites in a self-imposed blackout in protest of two coordinated Congressional bills, the Stop Online Piracy and Protect Intellectual Property Acts. Both aim to curb online copyright infringement, or the use or access of material like movies and music without permission of its owners, by expanding the government's power to punish infringers.

SOPA has been temporarily shelved to build more consensus in the House of Representatives.

Wikipedia, Facebook and Google have united with legal experts from universities across the country, media organizations and other members of the technology industry in opposition to the bills, which they say could severely hamper or even censor the freedom of expression that has defined the Internet throughout its short history.

Supporters, including the Motion Picture Association of America and the music industry, say it will protect intellectual property from an Internet free-for-all.

With the 24-hour shutdown, Wikipedia hopes to drum up awareness of, and opposition to, the bills, site co-founder Jimmy Wales told the New York Times Monday.

"When you consider the magnitude of how many people use Wikipedia globally, there is a potential here for really creating some noise and getting some attention in the U.S.," Wales said, adding that he saw the pair of bills as a First Amendment issue. During the day, the site will post information for visitors to contact their state representatives about the bills.

Such a politically charged action is an unusual move for the tech industry, which has generally stayed out of politics. That's a measure of how seriously the industry takes these bills, said Michael Wagner, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

"A lot of these companies are apolitical until they feel like they can't be," Wagner said, though he added that the move might not be as effective as Wales and others imagine. Still, he said, "People are very resistant to changing how (the Internet) gets used."

The bills behind the controversy, if passed, would institute a penalty of up to five years in prison for someone who streams copyrighted content without permission 10 or more times in six months, a measure some students said could quickly have an impact very close to home.

"I know people with terabytes of downloaded content," said Grant Isaacson, a freshman business administration major who said he agreed with the bills' intentions, if not their reach.

Several other students said they would get in trouble under the statute and wouldn't talk on record.

The bills' main provisions would allow the U.S. government to go after websites that enable or facilitate illegal access to copyrighted material by ordering advertisers, credit card payment processors like PayPal and Internet service providers to stop doing business with those sites. The bills would effectively hit sites that pave the way to copyrighted material right where it hurts. If the bills are taken to their extreme, some opponents fret, a site like Facebook could be ordered shut down because one user-posted copyrighted material.

"(These bills) allow copyright holders to go to court to get orders directed at domestic websites that are infringing on copyright," said John Bender, a journalism professor who specializes in media law and freedom of expression issues.

He described the issue as "a California Civil War" between Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

For example, he said, if the search engine Google helped a user reach a game or movie illegally, the owner of that content could get an order that would prevent advertisers from working with the site.

"And, of course, that would be Google's main revenue," Bender said.

Foreign servers that host copyrighted content illegally are prominent targets of the legislation, which Bender said made sense.

"China's the one that would be foremost concern," he said, adding with a laugh, "They really don't respect intellectual property, or see it in the way we see it."

But other actions that would invoke these laws are decidedly less nefarious. A video of a family singing "Happy Birthday," a copyrighted song, infringes copyright, Bender said, just as a video of someone singing along with any copyrighted song would technically qualify.

The bill doesn't make anything illegal that isn't already, he pointed out, but gives copyright holders, along with the government, sharper teeth in dealing with actions like illegal downloading. Before, if a copyright holder discovered its content uploaded by a user onto a site like YouTube, it would just ask that site to take it down. With these bills, it'd be able to hit that site in the wallet if enough action wasn't taken quickly enough.

The problem many opponents see in this broad approach is the potential for collateral damage on expression that is perfectly legal, Bender said.

"The concern is that this is so protective of copyrights … that it is going to infringe on the legitimate expressive activities of other entities," he said.