If you’ve tried to check something in Wikipedia in the last hour or two, you’ll probably have seen a blacked out page linking to an explanation of its protest against SOPA – hundreds of other sites are doing similar. It might seem unfair to blackout all these sites worldwide (24 hours without lolcats!) for the sake of a US protest, but if this legislation is passed the whole world could suffer a lot worse.

SOPA and a similar proposal PIPA aim to address piracy in part by allowing for sanctions against a foreign site that breaks US copyright law.  This might include getting US servers to block access to the domain name; or getting US search engines to remove it from their results; or stopping it from receiving money from US advertisers.

Don’t Break the Internet (Lemley, Levine and Post) outlines from a legal point of view why this would be a Bad Thing for the internet as a whole; Foreign Libraries Will Be Infringing Sites Under SOPA (Eric Hellman) gives a specific example of just how bad it would be.  Because Project Gutenberg Australia, and many many other sites, could be classified as a “US-directed” site (defined by SOPA hilariously loosely as a site that doesn’t actively prevent someone in the US from accessing it) and includes content that, while in the public domain in Australia, is still under copyright in the USA.

What can we do about it, outside the US? We don’t have a representative to contact, at least not about these laws – there have been, and will be more, bad IP laws in our own countries to protest against.  But we can talk to the publishers supporting SOPA (pdf, 92kB), or even the publishers supporting the proposed Research Works Act (unrelated to SOPA or PIPA, but it would outlaw open access mandates and thus bolster publishers’ monopoly over scholarly publications) and the publisher making campaign contributions to the politicians who introduced the RWA.

Theoretically we could stop buying from these publishers.  In practice – yeah, well, we’ve got customers so we probably can’t, but we can withdraw any free labour we give them by way of writing or peer reviewing papers or editing journals for them. In other words, strike.  (That link’s blacked out against SOPA, but come back to it in 24 hours, it’s well worth it.) There are plenty of Open Access library science journals we can be supporting instead.