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Protests against SOPA, PIPA go viral

January 17, 2012 05:02 PM ET

Concern about the bills has been simmering for weeks and appears to have boiled over in the last few days. Late last week, Reddit announced that it would black out its site for 12 hours on Wednesday to express opposition to the measures.

The company was soon joined by Wikipedia, which said it would black out its site all day Wednesday. Numerous other sites then adopted the same plans.

Tiffiniy Chen, a co-founder of Fight for the Future, said protests against the bills is now so widespread "it is in many ways beyond us."

The organization's Sopastrike.com site offers various tips and links designed to make it easier for Website owners to participate in the strike or to register their protest with elected officials. "I'm not surprised at the response," Cheng said today. "These bills are extremely disrespectful to how the Internet works."

Garlin Gilchrist II, national campaign director for MoveOn.Org, another site that will go black tomorrow, said that so far more than 240,000 MoveOn members have signed petitions expressing their opposition to SOPA and PIPA.

"The bills are incredibly problematic, both as intended and as designed," Gilchrist said.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at Twitter @jaivijayan or subscribe to Jaikumar's RSS feed Vijayan RSS. His e-mail address is jvijayan@computerworld.com.

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