Computer Professionals' Union is a mass organization of information and communications technology (ICT) professionals, practitioners, and workers in the Philippines. It is registered in the Philippines as a non-stock, non-profit, non-government organization that promotes activist ICT principles and organize ICT professionals to provide ICT services to Filipino people. Their office is located at Quezon City and their current National Coordinator is Rick Bahague.
GoDaddy Inc. is an American publicly traded Internet domain registry, domain registrar and web hosting company headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, and incorporated in Delaware. As of 2023, GoDaddy is the world's fifth largest web host by market share, with over 62 million registered domains. The company has around 21 million customers and over 6,900 employees worldwide.
The Turn the Web Black protest, also called the Great Web Blackout, the Turn Your Web Pages Black protest, and Black Thursday, was a February 8–9, 1996, online activism action, led by the Voters' Telecommunications Watch and the Center for Democracy and Technology, paralleling the longer-term Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It protested the Communications Decency Act (CDA), a piece of rider legislation for Internet censorship attached to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and passed by the United States Congress on February 1, 1996. Timed to coincide with President Bill Clinton's signing of the bill on February 8, 1996, numerous websites had their background color turned to black for 48 hours to protest the CDA's perceived curtailment of freedom of expression. Thousands of websites, including a number of major ones, joined in the protest. The campaign was noted by major media outlets such as CNN, Time magazine and The New York Times.
Internet censorship in the United States is the suppression of information published or viewed on the Internet in the United States. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects freedom of speech and expression against federal, state, and local government censorship.
Music piracy is the copying and distributing of recordings of a piece of music for which the rights owners did not give consent. In the contemporary legal environment, it is a form of copyright infringement, which may be either a civil wrong or a crime depending on jurisdiction. The late 20th and early 21st centuries saw much controversy over the ethics of redistributing media content, how much production and distribution companies in the media were losing, and the very scope of what ought to be considered piracy – and cases involving the piracy of music were among the most frequently discussed in the debate.
The PROTECT IP Act was a proposed law with the stated goal of giving the US government and copyright holders additional tools to curb access to "rogue websites dedicated to the sale of infringing or counterfeit goods", especially those registered outside the U.S. The bill was introduced on May 12, 2011, by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and 11 bipartisan co-sponsors. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that implementation of the bill would cost the federal government $47 million through 2016, to cover enforcement costs and the hiring and training of 22 new special agents and 26 support staff. The Senate Judiciary Committee passed the bill, but Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) placed a hold on it.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was a proposed United States congressional bill to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to combat online copyright infringement and online trafficking in counterfeit goods. Introduced on October 26, 2011, by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), provisions included the requesting of court orders to bar advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with infringing websites, and search engines from linking to the websites, and court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to the websites. The proposed law would have expanded existing criminal laws to include unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content, imposing a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
The Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act is a bill introduced in the United States Congress proposed as an alternative to the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act, by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, and Representative Darrell Issa of California, a Republican. The text of the bill is available for public comment at keepthewebopen.com.
There were different but similar copyright bills in the 112th United States Congress: The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate. A typical route for legislation like this is to pass some version in both houses, then refer the two bills to a conference committee, which would produce a single bill likely to pass both houses.
On January 18, 2012, a series of coordinated protests occurred against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These followed smaller protests in late 2011. Protests were based on concerns that the bills, intended to provide more robust responses to copyright infringement arising outside the United States, contained measures that could possibly infringe online freedom of speech, websites, and Internet communities. Protesters also argued that there were insufficient safeguards in place to protect sites based upon user-generated content.
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act was a proposed law in the United States which would allow for the sharing of Internet traffic information between the U.S. government and technology and manufacturing companies. The stated aim of the bill is to help the U.S. government investigate cyber threats and ensure the security of networks against cyberattacks.
The Internet Defense League is an organization and network launched in March 2012 with the aim of organizing protests and other responses to perceived threats to Internet freedom and the open Internet. It was formed following the protests against SOPA and PIPA. It had 30,000 members as of 2013, consisting of organizations, websites, and individuals.
Domain Name System blocking, or DNS blocking / filtering, is a strategy for making it difficult for users to locate specific domains or websites on the Internet. It was first introduced in 1997 as a means to block spam email from known malicious IP addresses.
Move Your Domain Day, or MoveYourDomainDay, was an annual observance encouraging owners of domain names to transfer their domain registration away from registrars that supported the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). It was first held on 29 December 2011, the idea coming from a post on Reddit as a protest against prominent registrar GoDaddy's support for SOPA. In 2012, rival registrar Namecheap began an initiative to make Move Your Domain Day an annual event. Subsequent events were held on 22 January 2013, 5 February 2014, 27 January 2015, 2 February 2016, and 6 March 2018. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, and domain registrars Name.com and Hover have also participated. Namecheap has defined the initiative as "an annual protest and a commemoration of sorts that will continue to shine a light on the issue of a free and open internet". There have been no major Move Your Domain Day events since 2018.
Demand Progress is a US-based internet activist-related entity encompassing a 501(c)4 arm sponsored by the Sixteen Thirty Fund and a 501(c)(3) arm sponsored by the New Venture Fund. It specializes in online-intensive and other grassroots activism to support Internet freedom, civil liberties, transparency, and human rights, and in opposition to censorship and corporate control of government. The organization was founded through a petition in opposition to the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, sparking the movement that eventually defeated COICA's successor bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act, two highly controversial pieces of United States legislation.
Jared Friedman is an American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is a partner at Y Combinator in San Francisco, where he invests in and helps startups. Previously, Jared was the co-founder and CTO at Scribd, a digital library and document-sharing platform, which has 80 million users.
Internet Slowdown Day, part of the "Battle for the Net" initiative, was a series of protests against the repeal of net neutrality laws coordinated by websites and advocacy groups in the United States occurring on September 10, 2014. The official site explains: "On September 10th, sites across the web will display an alert with a symbolic 'loading' symbol and promote a call to action for users to push comments to the FCC, Congress, and the White House."
On July 10, 2012, the Russian Wikipedia blacked out in protest against the amendments to the law "On the Protection of Children from Information Harmful to their Health and Development" being considered in the Russian State Duma, as well as to draw public attention to Russian Internet Restriction Bill. On the day after the blackout, the title page of Russian Wikipedia displayed an information banner calling for opposition to the adoption of this bill.
