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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., still licking wounds from last week's defeat of the Protect IP Act and its House counterpart the Stop Online Piracy Act, is reportedly working on an even more sinister, Internet-regulating bill.
Few details have been publicly disclosed about the latest push by legislative Democrats to expand executive-branch authority over the Internet, but the Daily Caller has pieced together publicly-available clues suggesting that Reid's newest bill is even broader than President Barack Obama's cybersecurity proposal.
The effective success of grass-roots efforts to stall anti-piracy legislation in the U.S. Congress now has people whose lives and careers are affected by piracy worried about their futures. With Congress unable to launch a successful dialog about proper methods to combat piracy; the entertainment industry having tried out for, and landed, the role of the villain; and with "Anonymous" launching somewhat successful attacks against U.S., Polish and other governments' websites in defense of the "right to piracy," content creators appear worried that any effort to resume a positive dialog might make them targets of public criticism.
At the moment, it's hard to have been anti-SOPA and yet appear proactive against piracy.
Dan Rowinski publishes an easy to understand explanation of SOPA. Joe Brockmeier wishes Americans were always so tuned in to their elected representatives' doings. A Google contractor is caught vandalizing Open Street Map. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.
After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.
Pro-Internet freedom Americans aren't the only ones who got pumped up about this Wednesday's Internet blackout day.
The L.A. Times reports that Chinese Internet users praised American Internet users for taking action against their own government. Wen Yunchao, a prominent Chinese blogger and government critic who left the mainland for Hong Kong, says that China's Great Firewall, which was initially about stopping online piracy and pornography, quickly became about Internet censorship of websites and content. Critics of SOPA/PIPA say that it would, in effect, do the same thing to the Internet in America.
Wikipedia blacked out its English-language site yesterday along with other major websites. It was a protest against Web censorship and a demonstration of its effects. Wikipedia's participation was a big win for the movement opposing SOPA/PIPA, the twin anti-piracy bills in Congress. Wikipedia is a resource millions use every day and most take for granted. It's the fifth most popular website in the world.
Wikimedia Foundation says the blackout reached 162 million people. Of those, 8 million used Wikipedia's tool to look up their congressional representatives. The blackout generated three trending Twitter topics when it started at midnight Eastern Time on Wednesday. Twitter also revealed frustration and lack of understanding of the blackout. But this was all by design. Censorship is frustrating. Wikipedians wanted a campaign that was both symbolic and effective, and that's what its staff delivered.
Yesterday Internet users across the United States rushed to their keyboards, sat up straight, and starred menacingly into their computer screens while silently saying in their heads: "Take that, Internet censorship!" Then they hit ENTER nearly 8 million times on petitions to help stop SOPA/PIPA. Internet giants Reddit, Wikipedia and Craigslist joined in the protests by going dark for an entire day. The bill caught the attention of mainstream media sources, even dominating the New York Times' homepage. Nineteen senators now oppose PIPA, including seven who formerly co-sponsored the bill. OpenCongress's Protect IP Act Senate whip count currently shows 33 senators supporting PIPA, and 39 opposing it.
The Socially Aware blog has put together a nice infographic that highlights several key decisions in social media case law, starting with the Sony v. Universal Supreme Court Betamax recording decision of 1984 and continuing to the more recent past. In light of the SOPA and PIPA protests and discussions of this week, I found the review enlightening and interesting to see how far we have gone in terms of legislating copyright violations and other digital misdeeds. Remember Facebook suing and ultimately crushing Power.com? How about Courtney Love's Tweet that supposedly defamed a fashion designer?
So what just happened? Well, several of the world's most prominent Web destinations interrupted their regular programming to remind their readers of the dangers of a world where certain content may be arbitrarily made to disappear. For most Americans, this was probably the first they'd seen of any efforts by Congress to change the Internet, for whatever reason they'd want to do so.
They were given links to click on to learn more. Some of those links led to the White House Web site, where over a hundred thousand people signed petitions urging the President to veto any bill that would suborn Internet censorship. A few of those links led, to our own surprise, to ReadWriteWeb; and for a few hours yesterday, our traffic rose to unprecedented levels.
Joe Brockmeier explains what he wishes everyone was saying about SOPA. This and more in today's Daily Wrap.
Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.
Several internet giants either blacked out today, or came out strongly against SOPA and PIPA. ReadWriteWeb covered the issue, noting who spoke out, who blacked out and who jumped in to fill any gaps. You can see all of our coverage of SOPA and PIPA all in one place.
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