Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge

It’s 9PM and you just remembered that your teacher gave you homework but you have no idea how to answer the questions. What you – or most of us – will do is probably to go to Google and search for the answer. Your search results returns with Wikipedia’s webpage on the top and you would click on the link – even though our teachers kept on saying “Do not trust Wikipedia because you and I can edit it” – but instead of getting the answers you want, you are greeted with a black webpage with a political statement stating “Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge”.

You may wonder why Wikipedia would want to blackout their website. The answer is simply because it’s 18th January. It’s the day where people or organisations who oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property (IP) Act (PIPA) protest by simply
a. Taking down their website and replace it with texts or pictures that says they are against the bills and asks you to write to your house of representatives – US Citizens only.
b. Censor their company’s logo or name – examples would be Electronic Frontier Foundation and Google (you can only see the censored “Google” if you’re in the United State).

It’s actually a law brought up by U.S. Lawmakers. You may wonder why a nation’s law – the United State in this case – caused International level protest. It may be because most of the affected organisations are based in the United State – few examples would be Facebook, Twitter, Google, AOL and Mozilla. Admit it; most of you probably can’t live without those mentioned websites.

But hey, you have been warned!

Student warning!Do your homework early.Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday! #sopa
— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) January 16, 2012

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