I just wanted to make sure all of you get your Thousandaire fix today, because tomorrow you won’t be able to read anything on this site.
Thousandaire will be blacked out tomorrow in protest of the SOPA and PIPA bills that are working their way through congress right now.
SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA is the Protect IP Act. Both are very similar pieces of legislation (one in the House and one in the Senate) and I believe they are a huge threat to the internet remaining a platform for free discussion and business innovation. If either of these bills is passed, many sites will be blacked out for hosting copyrighted content or even having links to copyrighted content anywhere on their site, included in user submitted content.
That means any one of your favorite sites with user submitted content like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Wikipedia or others can be brought down just because a user posted a link to something illegal. This also applies to blogs like this one where users are free to submit whatever they like in the comments.
If you want to participate in the SOPA blackout, go here and find out how.
If you want to know more about SOPA, look at this infographic, read this article, or watch the embedded video:
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
Kevin McKee is an entrepreneur, IT guru, and personal finance leader. In addition to his writing, Kevin is the head of IT at Buildingstars, Co-Founder of Padmission, and organizer of Laravel STL. He is also the creator of www.contributetoopensource.com. When he’s not working, Kevin enjoys podcasting about movies and spending time with his wife and four children.
I’m blacking out Money Spruce as well! Already got my plugin set up and ready to go!
Good for you man. We need as much awareness as we can get. I know our sites aren’t huge, but we might get a few people to think about it. Every little bit helps.
Maybe Wikipedia’s blackout will give us a chance to move our sites up in Google search rankings. 🙂
The way I understand it, the blackout won’t affect SEO. At least I hope not.
Wikipedia is doing that too, but I bet you’ll have a bigger impact. 😉
Definitely. Everyone knows Thousandaire is pretty much the biggest site in the world. Maybe Google is bigger, but not by much.
SOPA? PIPA? What kind of communist crap is that! Is this China or the United States? Hurray for your blackout, all of your readership will still be here when you return.
I hope they are all here. The question is, will the internet still be here in it’s current form if the blackout doesn’t work? My guess is no.