Pirate Party, Mozilla plot anti-SOPA campaigns

POLITICAL UPSTART the Pirate Party has confirmed its opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the US, as if there was ever any doubt, while the open source web browser and email client developer Mozilla is also blacking out some of its web pages.

Its opposition has always been a surety but the Pirate Party has put out a message on the day that SOPA will be debated in the US Congress.

Although there are murmurs that SOPA has gone away in fact it is only really on a shelf, and a very easy to reach shelf at that. It is being debated today and will be again in February and as it gets closer so has opposition hardened, the Pirate Party included.

"On January 18, many websites will voluntarily go on strike to demonstrate against the threat of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) bills," said the Pirate Party in a statement. "Regardless of whether its purpose is legitimate or whether it will work; the legislation is not compatible with democratic values."

The Pirate Party is calling on other firms to follow the lead of Reddit and Wikipedia and black out their web sites today. It said that the protest is important as it will help to raise awareness and stop the passage of ill-advised laws that would damage the internet and have far reaching repurcussions.

"These laws would make social networks, search engines, and all websites providing space for discussion and information exchange impossible to run without massive surveillance of all users and the censorship of everything they publish. A link placed by a user in the comment section of an article in a regular Internet magazine could result in the magazine going bankrupt and the owners being charged with a crime," it said.

"This would not only cripple innovation and entrepreneurship, it would be a flagrant violation of the fundamental human right to free speech. Pirate Parties are joining the protest and oppose these bills on the grounds that they will erode the rights of every internet user around the world... Pirate Parties urge other websites to join the strike on the 18th."

Other web sites are joining of course, and today Google changed its US search page to highlight its opposition. Our US correspondent can see a blacked out Google logo, but the rest of us must content ourselves with its link to a page of protest information. The Wikipedia blackout appears to be having the most impact, at least judging by the negative comments it is garnering on Twitter.

Mozilla is the latest big name firm to black out part of its services in protests, and its Firefox splash page now shows an anti-SOPA message, while other key pages also redirect to the same message.

This action is backed up by various blogs from the firm and its staffers that explain its opposition in more detail.

"While we generally support the end goal of the legislation - to limit online piracy of legitimate content - we believe that both PIPA and SOPA, in their current drafts, have serious flaws in the proposed implementation of the legislation," said Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla in a blog post in which he called for industry participation in writing legislation.

"We can find a solution. We need all parties to come to the table and find solutions that remedy the situation without bypassing due process. We're not in support of the suppression of free speech. We are in support of working with the content industry to solve the problem." µ