Behold! What the Stop SOPA blackout managed to accomplish in 24 hours.

A protest wouldn’t be a protest without clever signs!

[Related.] 

moneyries:

I snapped this pic of a protester at New York’s “emergency meetup” outside Senator Gillibrand and Senator Schumer’s midtown offices. Then I ran home to write this story.

One of your tumblrs had quite the adventure today!

Representative Justin Amash (R-Mich.) has joined a multi-website protest of SOPA and PIPA, two anti-piracy bills, by changing his Facebook profile photo and posting a status update protesting the bills. 

On Wednesday, January 18, I will join others across the Internet in a 24-hour “blackout” to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. These bills give the federal government unprecedented power to censor Internet content and will stifle the free flow of information and ideas. In protest, I have changed my profile picture and will temporarily disable your ability to post independent content on my Wall (although you still may comment under this post). Demand that Congress and the President keep the Internet open and free…

Read Amash’s post in full.

Also, Politico is reporting that, Rep. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Lee Terry (R-NB), two co-sponsors of SOPA, will pull their names from the bill. Quayle did so on Tuesday and, Politico reports, Terry will follow suit today. 

(h/t Tech Crunch) 

joshsternberg:

Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA)

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)

Reps. Ben Quayle (R-AZ) and Lee Terry (R-NE)

I want them to remember that lawmakers and lobbyists who don’t understand the Internet have no business trying to regulate it.

Erik Martin, reddit general manager, telling us what he thinks you should take away from today’s Internet blackouts.

Tweets from kids trying to use Wikipedia for their homework—and failing. SOPA! 

[h/t gangster curator Katie Notopoulos]

Wikipedia goes dark. SOPA!

Boing Boing goes dark. SOPA!

motherjones:

This is one of the draft blackout screens for Wikipedia’s planned outage tomorrow in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate twin, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) … Siddhartha Mahanta and Nick Baumann explain how Reddit, Wikipedia, and BoingBoing took on one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies—and won.  

“This is going to be wow,” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Twitter Monday. “I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington.” Wikipedia, the sixth most visited site in the world, will go black from midnight EST tonight until midnight Wednesday.