CAIRO: Reporters Without Borders will close its English language website down for 24 hours from 8 am on January 18 in protest of two controversial bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), which are now pending in the US Congress. Many fear that the bills will usher in unprecedented Internet censorship, and a sharp decline in online freedoms. In a press statement published on Wednesday, Reporters Without Borders called the pending legislation “a death blow to digital freedom.” “We have decided to close our English-language website for 24 hours to symbolize the oppressive gag that would spread over the Internet as we know it if SOPA and PIPA are adopted,” said Reporters Without Borders, a vocal opponent of the bills since their genesis. “Such legislation would discredit the US government's advocacy of worldwide online freedom of expression and would really hurt netizens who use censorship circumvention tools and open-source communities. We appeal to US senators and representatives to reject these repressive bills and to find other ways to protect intellectual property rights,” the statement continued. Support for the two bills has deeply divided the country, with the fault lines falling primarily between the entertainment industry on one side and the tech industry on the other. Under the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), websites suspected of violating intellectual property rights would be blocked, forcing collaborative sites like YouTube and Facebook to police their own content to prevent a shut down. Search engines could also be forced to omit suspicious websites from their results, and nline advertisers and services would be forbidden to operate on these sites. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would allow copyright holders the right to demand the withdrawal of online content without referring to a judge. Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, called the two bills “the equivalent of being angry and trying to take action against Ford just because a Mustang was used in a bank robbery.” The social networking site Reddit will be among those halting operations for a day on January 18 to protest the bills. Wikipedia will also shut down for 24 hours. The Senate will vote on PIPA on January 24. The hearing for SOPA, set for January 19, has been postponed. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/ZKyOm Tags: PIPA, Reddit, Reporters Without Borders, SOPA, Wikipedia Section: Latest News, Media, North America, Tech
