Stop Online Piracy Act (a similar bill, called the Protect IP Act, is in the Senate). In a misguided attempt to curb piracy on the web, the bills would introduce website blocking at the DNS level, among other things, in a way that would effectively amount to censorship. And they could have disastrous implications to everyone from Mega giants like Facebook being shut down to Pet Bloggers being sued for using a pop song behind the cute pictures of their dogs.
The threat is so serious that some of the internets largest companies, including AOL, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo, and Zynga sent a joint letter to Congress over the issue. A congressional hearing being held today has prompted many sites to add a ‘Stop Censorship’ banner on top of their logos (you can get one here). And now some other services are taking even more drastic measures.
Tumblr took their campaign a step further then writing a letter. They have censored all of their users Dashboards so they cannot see a single post. The above illustration is a screenshot of my tumblr dashboard. At the top of each users dashboard is a link prompting users to Stop The Law That Will Censor The Internet. Click the link, and you’ll be prompted to enter your phone number and street address. Tumblr will then call you to run through some talking points and tell you how to call your House Representative. That is how serious these sites think the passing of this bill is.
PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
