2012 Annual Report/Wiki version/Blackout
Shaping, Sharing, Growing — 2011–2012 by the Numbers — The year in Fundraising — When Wikipedia went dark for a day — Our key Media Stories — Wikimedia gets GLAM — Building a Legacy: Our work in Education — Monmouthpedia: A case study in innovation — Evaluation Summary from Ting Chen, Chair, Wikimedia Foundation
When Wikipedia went dark for a day
On 18 January 2012 the English language Wikipedia was blacked out in protest against two proposed pieces of US legislation – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The blackout was decided upon after extensive online discussion by the English Wikipedian community. The protest gained widespread mainstream media coverage with almost every news outlet highlighting the story in one way or another. The reasons for the blackout are well described in this article by Steve Virgin, written as a Wikipedian, which first appeared in the New Statesman magazine on 17 January 2012.
"Over the last few weeks, the Wikipedia community has been discussing proposed actions that the community might take with relation to proposed legislation in the United States called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate.
"If passed, these would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia. With more than 2,000 Wikipedians commenting on this legislation from all over the world, and a clear majority in favour of taking action, this was the first time the English Wikipedia has ever staged a public protest of this nature, and it's a decision that wasn't lightly made.
"It was felt that both SOPA and PIPA are pieces of clumsily drafted legislation that are dangerous for the internet and freedom of speech. It provides powers to regulatory authorities to force internet companies to block foreign sites offering 'pirated' material that violates U.S. copyright laws. If implemented, ad networks could be required to stop online ads and search engines would be barred from directly linking to websites 'found' to be in breach of copyright.
"However, leaving to one side the fact that there are more than enough adequate remedies for policing copyright violations under existing laws, in most jurisdictions, these draft bills go too far and in the framing SOPA and PIPA totally undermine the notion of due process in law and place the burden of proof on the distributor of content in the case of any dispute over copyright ownership.
"Therefore, any legitimate issues that copyright holders may have get drowned out by poorly-framed draconian powers to block, bar, or shut down sites as requested by industry bodies or their legal representatives. Copyright holders have legitimate issues, but there are ways of approaching the issue that don't involve censorship.
"Wikipedia depends on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. This needs other sites to be able to host user-contributed material; all Wikipedia then does is to frame the information in context and make sense of it for its millions of users.
"Knowledge freely shared has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikipedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or, if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, will mean that the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.
"All around the world, we're seeing the development of legislation intended to fight online piracy, and regulate the Internet in other ways, that hurt online freedoms. Our concern extends beyond SOPA and PIPA: they are just part of the problem. We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone."
Partly as a result of the protest, SOPA and PIPA have been indefinitely postponed.