The Register to publish other sites' blacked-out content in SOPA protest

Vulture Central in selfless bid to save the internet

Updated As many Register readers will be aware, websites across the internet have pledged to black out all or part of their content as a protest against the proposed US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

We at the Register applaud these noble acts of self-sacrifice, in which we will see the English-language Wikipedia sort-of blacked out (see below for details of how to get round this) and Wired blacking out its headlines.

However we feel that these protests against ham-fisted attempts by the recording industry and its Washington puppets to muzzle THE ENTIRE INTERWEBS simply do not go far enough. The advocates of SOPA say they will shut down any website guilty of online content piracy: Wikipedia, Wired and the rest say that SOPA could mean any website at all being blocked, and have blocked themselves in protest.

We say NEVER. The Motion Picture Ass. of America and its cohorts shall not get away with this. The Register will demonstrate at once how SOPA could and shall never work, even more effectively than the blackouts, by quite simply copying and re-publishing all the content which has been blacked out - purely and simply as a protest and not in any way in a cynical attempt to profit from the content of many popular websites. Needless to say the websites in question could never condemn our actions as piracy as, erm, they are being carried out in an attempt to prevent the passage of evil anti-piracy - that is, censorship! - legislation. And what's bad for things that are bad for pirates is good for things that are good for the internet. And, what's more, we are striking a blow at the most insidious kind of censorship - self-censorship.

So, without further ado, here are links to all our new webpages, lifting the blackout curtain that the evil drafters of SOPA would hope to impose, indeed have imposed, upon our beloved interwebs:

Updated to Add

Unfortunately there was some kind of legal problem with our brilliant protest scheme, so instead we're bringing you a couple of splendid moments from coverage of the protests. These are real things which we are not making up.

From the Guardian - SOPA Blackout ... LIVE (Summary: 'It's still black')

From the BBC - Without Wikipedia, where can you get your facts? (Beeb tech expert Rory Cellan-Jones to the rescue. He suggests using Google Translate to turn non-English Wikipedia into English, plainly a far more elegant solution than simply turning off Javascript. Of course there are some, plainly not Rory, who would not regard Wikipedia alone as a satisfactory way of checking facts.)

From Wired - Why We've Censored Wired.com (All the headlines have been blacked out. Except that one. Luckily news aggregators, search engines etc can still read them!)

Enjoy! ®