Wikipedia has pledged to go dark this Wednesday for 24 hours in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).
The blackout will begin at midnight on Wednesday and run all day, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales confirmed on Twitter. It will be a global protest, but will only affect the English version of Wikipedia. The German site, however, will include a SOPA-related banner and "other languages will make their own decisions," Wales tweeted.
According to comScore data, the English Wikipedia receives 25 million average daily visitors globally, though with the press that Wednesday's protest receives, that could jump to 30 to 40 million, Wales speculated today.
"This is going to be wow. I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington on Wednesday. Tell everyone you know!" Wales tweeted.
SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA, would allow the Justice Department to obtain court orders and go after overseas "rogue" Web sites that traffic in countefeit goods, from purses to prescription drugs. Initially, SOPA authorized the DOJ to block the offending Web sites, but amidst backlash, bill sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith recently stripped Domain Name System (DNS) blocking from his bill. Sen. Patrick Leahy, author of PIPA, meanwhile, said he wanted to study DNS blocking before implementation.
Without DNS blocking, SOPA would still allow officials to "follow the money" and cut off payment options to foreign illegal sites, like credit-card processing or PayPal accounts. Search engines like Google and Bing would also still be required to remove infringing Web sites from their search results. Copyright holders could also still bring claims against foreign Web sites that steal their technology, products, or IP.
As a result, detractors are concerned that SOPA and PIPA are too far-reaching and could hurt legitimate Web sites.
"We have no indication that SOPA is fully off the table. PIPA is still alive and kicking," Wales tweeted. "We need to send Washington a BIG message."
Wales stressed that the decision for a Wikipedia blackout was not his own; he put it to the community for a vote. "I'm proud to be able in some small way to have a leadership role against censorship. But the community gets the credit here," Wales tweeted.
Wikipedia is not the only site going dark on Wednesday; Reddit.com has also pledged to shut down for the day. Wales said that he "canvassed opinion long before Reddit's announcement [but it] takes us a long time to decide things."
On Saturday, the White House stepped into the SOPA/PIPA debate, pushing for legislation that respects the freedom of the Web. That prompted criticism from News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch, who recently became a vocal Twitter participant.
The Senate is scheduled to take up PIPA later this month; there is no set schedule for when SOPA will be considered. In the wake of Smith stripping DNS blocking from his bill, meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa, who has proposed the rival OPEN Act, said he would postpone a Jan. 18 hearing on the topic.