For college students across the country, the unthinkable happened: For one day Wikipedia shut down, and the world took notice.
This popular online encyclopedia, known for its accessibility to its users and its helpfulness for wayward students, shut down in protest against several anti-piracy legislations that are soon to be floating on the Senate floor.
The English-language site of Wikipedia discontinued services on Wednesday at midnight Eastern Standard Time and continued to be off-line for the next 24 hours. When users tried to access information on Wikipedia, instead of being educated by their intended articles, they were instead directed to a black-and-white page stating, “Imagine a world without free knowledge.”
The two bills being protested by Wikipedia are the Stop Online Piracy Act (which is in the House of Representatives), and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (currently under consideration in the Senate). The aim of these bills is to try and stop the sales of pirated American products overseas. They would allow the Justice Department and copyright holders to seek court orders against websites that are known to carry copyrighted materials. In short, this bill would bar advertisement agencies and payment facilitators — such as PayPal and credit card companies — from doing business with these sites.
In a release from Wikipedia, Executive Director Sue Gardner explained the site’s reasoning behind the protest.
“All around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation intended to fight online piracy, and regulate the Internet in other ways, that hurt online freedom,” she said. “We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone.”
Supporters of SOPA and PIPA include the Motion Picture Association of America, the National Music Publisher’s Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. While these big organizations stand firm in their support of these legislations, Wikipedia is not alone in voicing complaints, as Google, Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon.com have all sided against these bills, feeling that it would hurt the industry and infringe upon free-speech rights.
Student reaction to SOPA and PIPA has also been strong.
“I think it is pretty ridiculous that they are trying to take away our free right to look at things on the Internet,” said Erin Edwards, a junior in Public Relations. “I don’t think that it’s fair that they can block out certain things that are going to effect businesses everywhere.”
Edwards’ concerns about the overstepping of these bills were also voiced by fellow junior Jessica Campbell, a junior who is majoring in Journalism and Electronic Media.
“I am not in favor of it,” Campbell said. “I think that these laws will have bigger consequences than the government realizes. I think they will end up censoring a lot more things than they intended to.”
For Campbell, her major issues with these bills are directed at the message this kind of legislation would send towards the freedom that the Internet has become known for allowing.
“I think that this (freedom) is one of the biggest pulls of the Internet, that it is sort of law-free in a way,” she said. “It would be unfair to try to stop it in this way. It would feel like we were in China or Iran or something like that.”
Campbell’s opposition to SOPA and PIPA are not based in an opposition to copyrights, but rather the infringement on the freedom of the Internet that these bills would represent.
“I think that it is a good idea to try and stop piracy and to protect individual property,” she said, “but the way they are going about it is all wrong. It’s extremist.”
As sites like Wikipedia and Google band together to fight these perceived “extremist” measures, many students are left wondering about the future of not only their Internet freedoms but also the immediate futures searching their favorites sites. And in the case of Wikipedia’s shutdown, many students are stopping to take notice.
“The whole Wikipedia thing didn’t affect me. I went on just to look,” Edwards said. “But I do know that it affected a lot of my friends.”
