Information Madness

Old and new media are battling over net rules. Things are no longer certain about the passage of antipiracy legislation that is affecting the internet. Some of the internet’s most popular sites are about to use a weapon that is the internet blackout day, today,  to block the antipiracy proposed legislation. At least ten thousand sites have pledged today that they will either shut down or turn the web pages black. This has been announced by `Fight for the Future’ which is a Worcester based group. Wikipedia has also announced that it will be switched off.

Wikipedia had already given a warning to the students to do their homework early last night as they are going to protest over bad laws today. About a dozen more popular websites are also planning to go dark today. Google Inc. plans to add a link to its search home page in the U.S. that will link to the information about the legislation. This is all happening because of a legislation that has been designed to stop foreign-based websites that sell pirated movies, music and many other products.

The bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act would allow the Justice Department to seek a court order that will require the U.S. search engines to remove such sites from their results pages.

The main problem is that the message of the traditional media about people paying for popular movies, TV shows and books is not going down too well with the web consumers who are used to getting their content for free from the internet.