Just a follow up on the events that took place yesterday where many of your favorite sites (like Wikipedia.org and Reddit) went offline to express their concerns over the SOPA and PIPA copyright bills floating through the house of representatives. Punknews.org was among the many sites who broke from a relatively apolitical stance to argue against this dangerous bill. Our reasoning for this can be found here along with a helpful video which lays out some of the problems and consequences of the legislation.

What was remarkable about this protest was the sheer strength of online boycotts in changing the minds of a significant number of senators and congresspeople. More than 115,000 websites and over 13 million internet users participated in yesterday's online protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate. Around 50,000 websites blacked out their sites completely or most of the site, with 4 top 10 and 13 top 100 sites participated by blacking out or driving contacts to Congress. Hundreds of millions of people viewed, listened to, watched, or attended some part of the day, in anticipation of the vote on PIPA in the Senate on January 24.

Having started with just 5 senators opposed to PIPA at the start of the new year, now internet users can count the 36 senators that have come out and publicly opposed to the bill, including 5 who were formerly co-sponsors. Many offices' phone lines were taken offline due to the call traffic and many senator webpages' simply stopped working due to the barrage of visits and emails being sent to them.