Stop SOPA and PIPA: blackout tips for webmasters
January 17th, 2012 by Michael Zimmermann
Tomorrow, many sites are taking a stand against proposed legislation in the United States — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. On Wednesday, January 18th, sites like Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and even the entire ICanHasCheezburger Network will protest these proposals in some way. Many of them, like Wikipedia, will be “blacking out” their site — effectively removing their content from the internet for the duration.
Taking down a website is no light matter. No matter how important the cause, many sites are a source of income and the return to business after a protest blackout should be considered.
Pierre Far (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google UK) has posted a good bit of information on how to temporarily remove your site from the internet while keeping the consequences in check.
Other methods
An alternative to this is an interstitial blackout, that still allows the site to be accessed, but only after the user sees a blackout message.
There is a handy SOPA Blackout JavaScript Utility for sites that wish to go this route — no content is then pulled from the site, but awareness is still created. There are also plugins for WordPress, Drupal, and others.
No matter your method, please consider the future of the internet, and help keep it open for all.
Tags: censorship, internet, internet blackout, PIPA, protest, SOPA, webmasters
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