In case you haven’t already heard, congress is currently reviewing new bills that threaten the very fabric of the internet. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill, and it’s sister bill, Protect IP Act (PIPA), are currently working their way through the United States Congress and the Senate. If these bills pass any copyright holder can simply allege a site infringes on their copyright and the site could be redirected at the DNS level and be cut off from all major ad services and payment processing services – all without any trial or due process of any kind. It’s scary stuff, but we won’t rehash the full issue here. Read this post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to learn more about this issue.
Many companies have voiced their protest and will be blacking out their sites or informing their users about these upcoming bills. We saw what other companies like Reddit and Craigslist were doing and wanted to offer other sites an easy way to participate. We came up with a javascript snippet you can add to your page that will show a popup like you see in the screenshot below. You can also click here to see it live.
The SOPA popup will only be displayed on January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC) by default, but if you’re javascript savvy feel free to change that. The popup will also only be displayed to a user once (by setting a cookie in their browser). You can also manually trigger the message before then by adding the hash #stopsopa to the end of any URL that has the JavaScript installed. If you don’t want our hosted version, feel free to grab the source from github, otherwise grab the snippet below and add it to your site. If you’re a Torbit user, you can add this to your site by simply selecting the option in your account on the Torbit filters page.
Installation
If you’re on WordPress.org, Blogger, or Typepad you can quickly install using plugins from the links below. For Blogger users, make sure you’re logged in before trying to install it.
To install the javascript snippet directly, copy this async snippet into the <head> or top of the <body> of your website:
Help us protect the internet! Contact your representatives, spread the word, and join us in protesting censorship!