This site has gone dark today Wednesday, 18 January 2012 in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) discussed in the US Congress, as well as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), currently debated in the European Parliament.
These initiatives amount to a global attempt to censor the Internet in the name of copyright. They will inevitably lead to policies and measures that deeply undermine freedom of speech, privacy, innovation and competition online.
These bills provide draconian mechanisms for enforcement of copyright which would restrict the essential freedoms the Free Software Foundation fights for, putting the very tools and sites used to publish and develop free software into jeopardy, as well as threatening the existence of websites with user-submitted information, including Wikipedia, reddit, web forums, and the mailing list service used by tens of thousands of free software developers.
As citizens, we must urge our elected representatives to oppose these illegitimate and dangerous laws.