TorrentFreak

January 18, 2012, will still be talked about decades from now. It is the day tens of thousands of websites, including giants such as Google, Wikipedia and Reddit, decided to take a stand against what they see as a hostile takeover of the Internet by Hollywood, the recording industry, and other rightsholders. As it faces two draconian anti-piracy bills, the free Internet is at stake. Whatever the outcome may be, history is being made today.

Tomorrow thousands of websites will protest the pending PIPA/SOPA anti-piracy bills. Wikipedia, Reddit and many others will do a blackout, and many other sites will organize similar protests. Today, Google announced that it will take part as well. The search engine will not go dark completely, but instead it will put a link on its [...]

Supporters of the pending PIPA/SOPA anti-piracy bills often use The Pirate Bay as a prime example of a website that can be taken out under the new legislation. But is that really the case? The Pirate Bay team has been silent on the issue, until now. As it turns out, the people behind the popular torrent site don’t believe the laws will do much to stop them, but they do fear for the future of the Internet.

Reddit founder Alexis Ohanion has been one of the most prominent opponents of the PIPA and SOPA bills. Just yesterday he debated the issues on MSNBC and later this week Reddit itself will join the PIPA blackout, taking the site offline for 12 hours. And there’s more. In a video just released Ohanion calls out [...]

Early December we broke the news that Wikipedia was considering to blackout its site to oppose the pending PIPA/SOPA bills, and today founder Jimmy Wales just confirmed that it’s on. Coming Wednesday the English Wikipedia will go dark. With this unprecedented move Wikipedia joins the ranks of Reddit, Mozilla, Boing Boing and many others. The [...]

The White House just released a statement commenting on the pending SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills in congress. While the Obama Administration sides with the opposition by saying that free-speech should be protected, censorship is evil, and that DNS-blocking is a no go, the statement doesn’t mean that the bills are off the table.

Oh the irony… Last week the anti-PIPA group Public Knowledge sent out an email asking people to attend town hall meetings to oppose the Protect Intellectual Property Act. Today the pro-PIPA group Creative America did the same, but unlike their name suggests their email isn’t very creative. In fact, some parts appear to be directly [...]