Supporters of the bill say it’s needed to safeguard the interests of rightsholders who claim their businesses are threatened by online piracy. Those opposing are worried that the unprecedented censorship tools it introduces will take out many websites on baseless or faulty claims of copyright infringement.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales belongs to the latter group, and behind the scenes he is mulling plans to blank out all Wikipedia pages in protest against the pending SOPA bill. On Saturday he posted a message on his user page asking the community for input on the idea.

Wales explains that the idea of a ‘self-censorship’ protest is inspired by a campaign the Italian Wikipedia community ran earlier this year.

“A few months ago, the Italian Wikipedia community made a decision to blank all of Italian Wikipedia for a short period in order to protest a law which would infringe on their editorial independence. The Italian Parliament backed down immediately,” he writes.

“As Wikipedians may or may not be aware, a much worse law going under the misleading title of ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ is working its way through [the Senate] on a bit of a fast track.”

“I may be attending a meeting at the White House on Monday along with executives from many other top Internet firms, and I thought this would be a good time to take a quick reading of the community feeling on this issue.”

By blanking out one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, the Wikipedia founder believes the community can send a strong message to their representatives in Washington. With billions of pageviews a month, a Wikipedia protest will definitely be noticed.

“My own view is that a community strike was very powerful and successful in Italy and could be even more powerful in this case,” Wales says.

The response from Wikipedia users to Wales’ plan has been overwhelmingly supportive. However, several users also placed critical notes and wondered whether Wikipedia is the right platform for a political protest.

“I oppose the legislation, but that’s a political view. I don’t ever want Wikipedia to take a political view, no matter how much I agree with it,” Ntsimp writes for example.

Others think that blanking out entire pages might not be an ideal solution, and call for alternative forms of protest such as displaying a black background.

In an update today, Wales responds to some of the points raised in response to the idea. However, he still stands behind the blanking out protest and says that something has to be done quickly before the bill is rammed through in Washington.

“Time is not on our side here,” he says.

Source: Wikipedia Mulls Total Blackout to Oppose SOPA

Wikipedia (and indeed the whole Wikimedia Foundation) just announced that it has started to use BitTorrent to stream its videos. The foundation is using Swarmplayer from P2P-Next to try and cut down on bandwidth costs.

The Wikimedia Foundation is concerned about bandwidth costs, as video becomes more prevalent on their various project sites (like News, and Quotes and the more famous Wikipedia project). In an announcement this week the foundation stated: “Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships.”

The system set up by Wikipedia uses a combination of webseeds and BitTorrent peers to spread the load. High priority pieces (like the start of the video) are pulled via more traditional HTTP sources, while later in the video where the data is of a lower priority it comes via the BitTorrent protocol. The process is described by P2Pnext in the following diagram;

Source - P2P Next

“I think it’s important as a technology and something that needs exploring,” Michael Dale, Kaltura Open Media Developer and Wikimedia admin told TorrentFreak. The 6000-or-so videos on the Wikimedia servers are all set to use the technology, as will any new ones that are added.

Currently, Swarmplayer is only available as a plugin for Firefox (3.x, it doesn’t work well with the version 4 betas). An Internet Explorer plug-in will be available within the next day or two and a Chrome plugin is planned as well, we are assured. Not so good news for the Opera and Safari users though, as there is no plugin currently planned for them. However, people are free to create their own as the code is open source. “We’re just counting on one hardcore Opera user to port it to Opera,” Dr Pouwelse of P2P-Next told TorrentFreak.

“This is another step in strengthening Web TV,” Pouwelse continued. “The long-term goal is to offer more choice, provide higher quality and increased reliability compared to traditional TV technology.”

Source: Wikipedia Adds BitTorrent Powered Video Streaming

Without a doubt, it is the most successful “checked content” project based on the English Wikipedia, used by hundreds of schools in first and third world countries. The project was originally aimed at schools in developing countries, but because of the high quality articles – all based around the UK curriculum with an absence of adult content – it is often used on intranets in first world schools too.

To save on resources, Wikipedia for schools is only available online via BitTorrent, which practically reduces the charity’s distribution costs to zero. SOS Children CEO Andrew Cates, who is a Wikipedia administrator himself, said that they have no other choice than to use BitTorrent, since the 2.9 GB download would crush their server.

“BitTorrent was a bit disappointing in that it got us the only substantial criticisms we received online,” Cates said in an interview with Wikinews. “A lot of people find it too much effort to use. However for the period we offered a straight http: download we had huge problems with spiders eating vast bandwidth.”

“As per last year therefore our main two channels will be free download by BitTorrent and mailing the DVDs free all over the world. At a pinch we will (as before) put straight copies up for individuals who cannot get it any other way, and we have some copies on memory sticks for on distributors,” Cates added.

The .torrent file is available for download on the SOS Children’s Villages website. For those who don’t want to install a BitTorrent client, the DVD can also be downloaded from any web browser with BitLet.

A final word of advice from SOS Children’s Villages: “It helps our charity if you keep µTorrent running after your download is finished.”

Source: Wikipedia DVD Released on BitTorrent

The police confiscated 14,000 CDs and DVDs containing pirated movies and music along with 143 burners, 222,000 jewel boxes and 40,000 inlay cards. The alleged pirates, including the sacristan and his son, are facing several years behind bars.

Pope Benedict XVI was not available to comment, and although the Catholic Church has a habit of promoting reproduction, it does not approve of Piracy.

In 2003 God himself had some issues with Reverend Alfred Jackson, a minister at the church of St. Cecilia in Kansas City, because he was “spreading the word”. Back then God said that ‘spreading the Gospel’ was not a valid defense for distributing copyrighted materials.”

Source: Church Official Arrested in Piracy Crackdown

Apparently, each of the articles has been “checked for suitability” and “cleaned by hand and script.” The CD is currently at release 1.0. Previous versions contained “disputed” articles relating to religion and politics, but they have subsequently been removed.

This CD is clearly aimed at schools and institutions with a slow, or non-existent connection to the Internet. Unlike Encyclopodia, the popular open source project that puts all of Wikipedia on your iPod, the Wikipedia CD is aimed at a younger audience who might find it hard to discern the clearly inaccurate or false from the ‘real’ information. It is a great effort, but at the same time one has to remember that the content on the CD is edited, and has therefore not been cross-checked by the innumerable people that frequent, contribute to and refine Wikipedia.

SOS Children did not have permission to use the Wikipedia logo, so it is not present on the CD, but they have recently been granted permission and it will appear on the next release in 2007.

Source: Wikipedia CD Distributed over BitTorrent