DevBridge Goes Dark for SOPA Protest

A potentially dangerous censorship bill called Stop Online Piracy Bill (SOPA) was gaining velocity in the senate, being primarily funded by the entertainment industry and other large corporations. In principle we all agree that online piracy is an issue, but we at DevBridge do not agree with the highly undefined means proposed to deal with it in this bill.

DevBridge.com supported the strike carried out on the 18th of January and redirected all of it’s traffic to http://sopastrike.com/. More than 75,000 websites participated in the strike, resulting not only in public awareness of this dangerous bill, but also in a drastic drop of support for the bill in the senate due to the flooding of calls and emails to the local representative offices.

Image is courtesy of http://sopastrike.com/.

On the evening of the 17th we primed our website to redirect the traffic and tweeted about our plans to go dark. Shortly after we were contacted by the Chicago Tribute and had the opportunity to express our opinion on the subject in the linked article.

I am glad to know that we, the technology industry, are able to unite and work towards a free, uncensored, and collaborative internet that is not controlled by private corporate interests. I’m sure this has been said a million times already, but the entertainment industry needs to look at the music industry (iTunes being the catalyst that redefined how music is purchased and the primary revenue source for the recording industry as of today) and follow in it’s footsteps. Policing is not the solution; adapting your product to a changing market, making it more affordable, cutting out the middle man - that’s the path to regaining consumer loyalty and their dollars.