SOPA and PIPA movement speed

By cstiern

  • Protect IP Act and Commercial Felony Streaming Act (Bieber bill) introduced in Senate

    Overwhelming initial support: 40 co-sponsors, 11 at time of introduction

  • Protect IP Act passes Senate Judiciary Committee by unanimous voice vote

    Mark-up session is 7 minutes long and no amendments are debated. Bill is placed on Senate calendar.

  • Commercial Felony Streaming Act is passed by Judiciary Committee by unanimous voice vote.

  • Gamer community recognizes the broad implications the felony streaming provisions in S. 978 (which later became part of SOPA).

    Videos by gamers are increasingly posted on YouTube.
    A Demand Progress call to action gains attention.

  • FreeBieber.org launches against the felony-streaming provisions in S. 978, provisions that would eventually became part of SOPA.

    FreeBieber.org

  • Anti-PIPA video released by FFTF. 4 million+ views over next 3 months on Vimeo + YouTube

  • SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) introduced in House with strong support31 co-sponsors (12 at time of introduction)http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show

  • The House Judiciary Committee holds hearings on SOPA

    American Censorship Day is held to commemorate the House Judiciary Committee's first hearing on SOPA (6000 + websites)
    1 million+ Congress contacts in one day
    2 million petition signers
    Boing Boing, Mozilla, Hype Machine, TechDirt agree to site takeover. 4Chan and 6,000 sites also take over their sites.
    Unprecedented Tumblr blackout (first major web company direct action)
    80,000 calls generated to Congress
    Thousands of sites blacked out their logo all day
    First mass political participation by we

  • Responding to day of protests, Nancy Pelosi tweets her opposition to SOPA

  • Period: to

    100,000's of calls during coalition-wide call-in campaigns to House Judiciary Committee

  • Colbert Report covers SOPA / PIPA

  • The House Judiciary Committee holds hearings on SOPA

  • Hearing ends without completing markup

  • Reddit post suggests transferring domains away from GoDaddy for their support of SOPA and PIPA

  • GoDaddy issues statement changing their public position on the bills to opposed

  • SOPA Strike is announced for Jan 18th - sopastrike.com launches to organize protest

  • Obama administration publishes blog post opposing SOPA / PIPA

  • Web Goes on Strike: Largest Online Protest in History, precipitated by reddit.com, wikipedia and grassroots groups

    Largest online protest of all time
    More than 1 billion people saw anti-SOPA messages on January 18
    4 top-10, 13 top-100 US sites, 115,000 small and medium sites participated in strike, 50,000 blacked out all or part of site (Wordpress network: 27,000 blackout and 17,000 ribbons)
    Participant list
    Largest participants include: Google,Reddit,Craigslist,Wikipedia,Wordpress
    Imgur, Pinterest, Flickr, Amazon
    10 million petition signers, 3 million emails, 100,000+ calls 3 Million Tweets