SOPA Blackout Day - How to stop SOPA (US) and ACTA (Europe)

As you've probably noticed, today; January 18th of 2012 is the Stop SOPA day. Popular websites like Wikipedia, Reddit and WhatsMyIP.org are all blacked out, as a protest against this legislation bill. There is now also a European counterpart called ACTA. Here's are some way that you can help stopping them from corrupting the Internet as we know it.

INTERNET REGULATIONS.  Although SOPA is strictly for the US, at least for now, the whole Internet as we know it would suffer. Major sites like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia, that are all used globally, goes under US legislation. Furthermore, having your website blacked out in whole USA could most certainly be a significant loss in terms of popularity as well as financial income.

ACTA - The SOPA of Europe, Australia and Mexico

Even outside the US, there's the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, which is a multi-national agreement with similar goals to the U.S.-only PROTECT IP and SOPA bills. It is criticized for many of the same reasons that PROTECT IP and SOPA are, but is also concerning because it has been drafted in secret.

Read more on SOPA here:

Protect IP / SOPA Act - U.S. Government about to Censor the Internet

How you can stop SOPA

Here are a few ways you can participate in the fight against SOPA and ACTA:

The most effective way would be to give your representatives a call or e-mail directly. If you're a US citizen you can find your representative here. If not, you can still sign the petition against SOPA.

Boycotting companies supporting SOPA is another way to effectively make a more long-term change. Find a full list of companies that support SOPA here!

The third thing you could do is to raise awareness. Tell all your friends about it, if they don't know about it already, and get them involved in the protest.

If you have a website, you can also take part in the blackout protest by embedding a short script in the code of your webpage. Find the SOPA blackout script here.

The fight will go on

Hopefully the SOPA bill will not pass this time. But even if it doesn't, that decision won't be definite. SOPA could be subject for reconsideration at any time, so it's an ongoing battle. So the best we can do is to continue boycotting SOPA supporting companies and politicians, until they reconsider their decision.

~theJo