Fight For The Future

SOPA Timeline

A timeline of how SOPA and PIPA went from seeming inevitable to sparking mass protest and unprecedented activism from internet organizations and web companies.

May 12, 2011

May 26, 2011

June 16, 2011

  • Commercial Felony Streaming Act is passed by Judiciary Committee by unanimous voice vote.

June 30, 2011

  • Gamer community recognizes the broad implications the felony streaming provisions in S. 978 (which later became part of SOPA).
  • Videos by gamers are increasingly posted on YouTube.
  • A Demand Progress call to action gains attention.

October 19, 2011

  • FreeBieber.org launches against the felony-streaming provisions in S. 978, provisions that would eventually became part of SOPA.

October 25, 2011

October 26, 2011

October 28, 2011

November 16

  • The House Judiciary Committee holds hearings on SOPA
  • American Censorship Day is held to commemorate the House Judiciary Committee's first hearing on SOPA (6000 + websites)
  • 1 million+ Congress contacts in one day
  • 2 million petition signers
  • Boing Boing, Mozilla, Hype Machine, TechDirt agree to site takeover. 4Chan and 6,000 sites also take over their sites.
    • Unprecedented Tumblr blackout (first major web company direct action)
  • 80,000 calls generated to Congress
    • Thousands of sites blacked out their logo all day
    • First mass political participation by web companies
    • Rep. Lofgren participates and censors her page
    • Reddit community becomes active on SOPA
    • subreddit /SOPA gains 10,000+ subscribers in just a few days

November 17

November 29 — December 15

  • 100,000's of calls during coalition-wide call-in campaigns to House Judiciary Committee

December 1

December 15, 2011

  • The House Judiciary Committee holds hearings on SOPA
  • Huge online audience for the hearing
  • Dozens of amendments introduced and voted down

December 16, 2011

  • Hearing ends without completing markup

December 22, 2011

January 2, 2012

December 29, 2011

  • GoDaddy issues statement changing their public position on the bills to opposed.

January 5, 2011

January 13, 2012

January 13-18, 2012

  • More members of Congress start to come out against the bills citing meetings with constituents.

January 14, 2012

January 18, 2012

  • Web Goes on Strike: Largest Online Protest in History, precipitated by reddit.com, wikipedia and grassroots groups:
  • SOPA Strike Protest Happens
    • Largest online protest of all time
  • More than 1 billion people saw anti-SOPA messages on January 18
  • 4 top-10, 13 top-100 US sites, 115,000 small and medium sites participated in strike, 50,000 blacked out all or part of site (Wordpress network: 27,000 blackout and 17,000 ribbons)
  • Participant list
  • Largest participants include:
    • Google
    • Reddit
    • Craigslist
    • Wikipedia
    • Wordpress
    • Imgur, Pinterest, Flickr, Amazon
  • 10 million petition signers, 3 million emails, 100,000+ calls and 8 million Wikipedia call lookups to Congress opposing PIPA
  • 3 million+ tweets mentioning "SOPA", "PIPA", "sopastrike", "blackoutSOPA", "stopSOPA"
  • Top 10 trending search terms on google: "sopa and pipa bills", "piracy", "censorship", "blackout"
  • Thousands protest outside senators’ offices in NYC, SF, Seattle, DC
    • Gallery of blacked-out sites and other actions here soon.
  • Senate responses:
    • At least 13 senators backed away from the bill in one day. 5 co-sponsors dropped their support of the bill: Blunt, Boozman, Cardin, Hatch, and Rubio
  • 1/19 PIPA Whipcount becomes meme of the day

January 24, 2012

  • Senate plans to take up PIPA
    • Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) plans fillibuster