What was the reaction to SOPA/PIPA?



blogworld.com

Needless to say, private individuals and some companies
were not happy with the proposed bills and in late 2011
small protest began to pop up.





On November 16, 2011, also named "National Censorship Day", the first hearing in congress for the bills was held. This sparked the online protest by 115,000 companies , such as Google, Reddit, Mozilla, and many others, that closed or restricted some of their content for the day. The following picture is what people found when they went to the Wikipedia site.

en.wikipedia.org

Physical protest were also held throughout the country to help drive their point home that SOPA/PIPA were infringing on every one's rights. GO DADDY, who was a supporter of SOPA/PIPA were also boycotted during the month of December 2011.

Attention was brought back to SOPA/PIPA in January 2012 when Congress was to reconvene and continue discussions on them. This also brought attention to the continued online protest that was to be scheduled at the same time. Over 8 million people looked up their Congress representative on Wikipedia on January 18th and over 3 million emails were sent to Congress to display the public's dissatisfaction with the proposed bills.
By January 20th the bills had lost so much support that they were removed from any further voting.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-the-internet-killed-the-stop-online-piracy-act/#image-16

Next time: Who are the Pirates?