On January 18th, it was hard to miss what was the largest (digital) protest in world’s history as millions of people, and the largest internet companies stood up against the proposes SOPA and PIPA laws (watch the 5mn “what is SOPA” video here). If you don’t know what SOPA and PIPA are, both are basically law proposals that would end up making it impossible to have user-generated content sites and services like YouTube, WordPress.com, Disqus, or even Ubergizmo because if one user or commenter uploads a copyrighted image, or content, the whole site could be taken down. Today, websites are required to remove that content and most are actively participating in the fight against piracy. To date, both laws have been put on hold, but not eliminated.
FrugalDad.com has compiled some numbers in the nice infographic below. It is self-explanatory and definitely worth a look. Among the interesting numbers, Congress got 400,000 calls, 10M people have signed petitions against SOPA and PIPA, and 3M emails were sent to politicians backing the proposal. More importantly, this pushed other Senators to jump in and to issue statements against the bill.
The “The Day the Internet Stood Still” sounds great, although it’s also fair to say that this is a bit of an exaggeration. The event was nonetheless a great success, and it is comforting to see that so many people have expressed their opinions on this important subject. More stories about SOPA
Source: frugaldad.com