As you have no doubt already noticed, most likely while attempting to find out what Uncle Jesse’s band name was on Full House sometime around 3 a.m., Wikipedia is down today—just one of the thousands of sites that have yanked themselves from the web in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and its comrade, the Protect IP Act. Other popular web destinations such as Craigslist, Reddit, and Boing Boing have also gone dark, while sites such as Google, WordPress, and Wired have all demonstrated solidarity by blacking out their logos or even content. Even those innocent LOLCats are caught in the fray: You can has Cheezburger, but only after you has serious consideration about what you can do to join the chorus of dissent.
Just because The A.V. Club chose not to go dark ourselves (though we had several serious discussions about it) doesn’t mean that we don’t recognize that the passage of either piece of legislation could have serious ramifications for our site and the Internet at large. We’ve heard the counter-protests of the MPAA, which yesterday slammed protesting sites for participating in “stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns.” We find this deeply ironic—not least considering it issued from the mouth of Senator-turned-MPAA chief executive Chris Dodd, one of the biggest, most hypocritical corporate stooges around. But also because SOPA/PIPA both punishes users and turns government officials into corporate pawns, allowing media conglomerates’ efforts to protect the stuff they own to become pretext for legislation that could dramatically change the Internet. The fact that Dodd actually holds up China as some sort of paradigm tells you all that you need to know.