The climax is building as the January 24 senate debate for SOPA nears. The reddit community earlier this week organized a protest blackout happening next Wednesday, and now more website are jumping on the Anti-SOPA blackout bandwagon. So far, the wagon has picked up Mojang, as well as Destructoid, Anonymous the Cheezburger Network and a couple others, with Wikipedia still debating whether to join.
Minecraft creator @notch confirmed in a tweet earlier today that the Mojang and Minecraft websites will go dark on January 18 in solidarity against SOPA. The AnonymousIRC account also tweeted there would no activity from the Twitter account on the blackout date, though its not clear if Anonymous will be taking more extreme action in protest. The Destructoid video game blog confirmed a blackout as well
Some more websites to jump on the blackout, which confirmed via company blogs, include the Major League Gaming network, Good Old Games (GOG.com) and Tucows. Also on board with the blackout is Cheezburger, Inc. CEO Ben Huh, who previously mobilized the Cheezburger network to boycott GoDaddy. Ben Huh tweeted that all Cheezburger sites will go dark, and he then drew attention to Wikipedia’s indecision.
Geekosystem states that a main argument connected to the reddit blackout is the lack of big players such as Google, Twitter or Facebook. The current roster of blackout websites cater to niche groups. However, Wikipedia has mulled a blackout in the past, and on Thursday in a discussion threat, Jimmy Wales put the decision on the Wikipedia community:
“I’m all in favor of it, and I think it would be great if we could act quickly to coordinate with Reddit…I think that matching what Reddit does (but in our own way of course) per the emerging consensus on how to do it, is a good idea. But that means we need to move forward quickly on a concrete proposal and vote – we don’t have the luxury of time that we usually have, in terms of negotiating with each other for weeks about what’s exactly the best possible thing to do. As I understand it, the Foundation is talking to people about how we can geolocate and guide people to their Congressperson, etc. Geoff will know about that. Our task is to decide to do it with a thumbs up / thumbs down vote.”
If Wikipedia falls in with reddit perhaps some of the other big players will follow, but time is running out.
Via Reddit list of confirmed websites for blackout
This article was originally posted on Digital Trends
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