Wikipedia protest US Government internet control Ireland

Sceala Philosopher Location: Dublin

Need a wikipedia fix

Easy just turn off javascript in your net browser.
All Wikipedia have done is place a javascript call to cover any page. The Wikipedia page is still there.
Wikipedia is closed today
With javascript in Ireland
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Wikipedia is closed today, but without Javascript.
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Wikipedia is open as usual.
The largest free knowledge encyclopedia available online, it is open to edit, for corrections and mistakes, even possible abuse by the public. Any information supplied on
Wikipedia should at least be questioned, if not doubted, never the less Wikipedia is a first rate source for instant answers, providing access to knowledge unimaginable a generation ago.

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How the SOPA opera could kill the Internet
January 18 2012 will go down in history as the day society went nuts over the inability to check random facts.
Online crowd sourced encyclopedia Wikipedia's 'day of protest' against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) saw the website 'go dark' - or make itself unavailable - for a 24-hour period.

While as many as 7,000 websites participated in the protest in some way, it's not quite a united front. Twitter COO Dick Costolo tweeted that the protest did his business no favours, and that revoking service to his the entire user base over "single-issue national politics" was "foolish" - a claim he later clarified as being relevant only to Twitter, not the protesters en masse.

Costolo may well have to rein in on that statement: if SOPA or PIPA pass, the "single-issue" politics he dismisses as being of only peripheral interest to Twitter, in a worst case scenario could end up destroying it.

Effectively dealing with the same issue of online piracy of copyrighted material SOPA (opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/text) and PIPA (opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/text), working their way through the House of Representatives and Senate respectively, seek to target websites trading in pirated content, either by selling directly, charging subscriptions or linking to other sites that do.

For the entertainment industry SOPA/PIPA represents a zero tolerance approach to websites that would make money pirating from material. For the rest of the Internet this could represent the end of the concept of fair use and freedom of expression online.

Under the terms of the proposed Acts, anyone that shares a clip of a pop video without permission by posting it to their Facebook or Twitter profile, or uploads a video of themselves singing a song without the rightsholder's permission is effectively committing an act of piracy, and the host website facilitating the infringement. Should the entertainment industry have its way the likes of Justin Bieber, discovered on YouTube, would not only not have been discovered, he would likely have been sued. That said poppet has made millions for the recording industry only serves to illustrate the ridiculousness of this position.

To the casual observer it's obvious that SOPA and PIPA are ill-conceived products of intense lobbying and corporate groupthink, driven by a short-sighted profit motive. Yes, the entertainment industry is losing out to illegal file sharing and dodgy Web stores should be shut, but for the Acts' proponents to argue that social networks and discussion forums can be places where the unauthorised distribution of work can take place and should be sanctioned smacks of desperation. To a certain extent they are right, but hardly sympathetic.

Trigger effect

On the opposite side is the tech community, raised on a remix culture where new ideas are constructed from those already in the public domain - from pictures of cats to fan-made pop videos to news from a thousand sources aggregated on Google. And yes, there is the perception that music doesn't have to be paid for, that CDs are overpriced and that anodyne content is devaluing the industry. To a certain extent they are right, but hardly sympathetic.
Niall Kitson is editor of TechCentral.ie

Wikipedia are correct to protest. The USA government is trying to control the internet, control knowledge.
Would be a shame if Americans or any of us allowed that.
We do not want any Government telling us what we can and can't read. Knowledge is power.
And the Wikipedia javascript trick, that's just one insignificant way of suggesting its probably too late for anyone to think they can control the people.
Support Wikipedia and resist any censorship of free knowledge.

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Wikipedia protest US Government internet control Ireland