By Eli Bolus and Chase Gosman

Today hundreds of websites will go down and be unusable for the remainder of the day.  This is not a technical error but a unified act of defiance to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that will be going through Congress this February.

The SOPA will allow the government to block any website that violates the rules they will set.  For example if a person claims a site is infringing on copyright laws the government can block anyone using an American I.P. from accessing it.  This means user-generated sites like YouTube and Flickr would be affected greatly.

As expected much of the internet has responded in outrage.  Among the websites going black for the remainder of today are all of Wikipedia’s pages, barring the SOPA page, greenpeace.com and reddit.com.  By going black a website blocks all material.

Websites hope that by doing this more people will become informed of the bill and attempt to contact their congressmen.  Those who would like to learn more about SOPA can read about it on wikipedia.com.