Students attempting to find information for last minute papers on Wednesday, Jan 18 were missing a valuable resource: Wikipedia. The website took part in one of the largest protests of our time; and it all happened over the Internet.  Wikipedia, along with other sites such as popular social news website Reddit, opted to black out their sites to spread awareness of the SOPA and PIPA acts. While they certainly got the attention of their public and drastically swayed the support of the acts, many viewed it as simply a publicity stunt. Also, while everyone seemed to understand the negative impacts of the act, not many people looked into why the acts were considered in the first place.  Here’s a quick breakdown of the acts: SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, was an act going through the House of Representatives. Its intention was to black out all “rogue” websites, as well as make them unsearchable by search engines such as Google. PIPA, the Protect IP Act, is incredibly similar to SOPA, which means it’s often confused for SOPA. The main differences are that PIPA is a Senate bill, so many people believe it would have a better chance of passing due to the age of the Senate members, and PIPA does not say anything about search engines. The US Chamber of Commerce defended this in a letter to the New York Times editor, stating, “rogue Web sites that steal America’s innovative and creative products attract more than 53 billion visits a year and threaten more than 19 million American jobs” However, while the Entertainment Software Association initially did support these acts, even they have revoked their support.  Critics found multiple problems with this act; the most prominent being how similar it is to acts that we constantly criticize when implemented by other countries. These tactics are comparable to the acts taken by China to censor the internet, which caused outrage in America. Another criticism is found within the fact that these websites had no way to fight SOPA’s accusations. When the Department of Justice determines that a website should be taken down, there is very little the website can do about it.  Google put out a graphic detailing how many people in certain fields were against it, including 110 law professors warning of the legality of the bill itself, and all kinds of technical experts concerned for not only the detrimental effect the bill would have on the Internet economically, but also with the infrastructure. Through their research, these experts have voiced concern that this process would damage the structure of domain names as a whole.  The effect the protest efforts had on this issue was quite impressive. With websites such as Google, Tumblr, Wikipedia and Reddit spurring the movement along, over 3 million Americans signed online petitions to ban this bill from passing, and nearly 900,000 Americans called their local Congressmen to express their opinion. Junior Timothy Montalvo cited the massive effect social media played in this, stating “particularly for me in my newsfeed, every other one had something to do with SOPA or pirating and I think that really says something for social media and how it helps to get the word out.” These protestors really made a difference, and at time of deadline for this article, 189 representatives were against the bill or “leaning no,” while only 61 remained to support it. Now, other legislation is moving to the forefront on piracy that will hopefully resolve many of the issues people had with SOPA and PIPA. However, while the effect these protests had on the act is very inspirational, it’s hard to believe that we won’t face this issue again soon.