The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) represents a very real danger to the internet. If passed, it will have a significant impact on our freedoms, job growth in America, and will without a doubt, stifle innovation. Many websites that rely on interaction from visitors would be in violation of SOPA, and would cease to exist. As a result, both Reddit and Boing Boing will be staging a blackout on January 18th. Their goal is to raise awareness of what can happen if SOPA is passed into law.

WordPress users can easily join them in this blackout, with the new SOPA Blackout Plugin. This plugin makes it easy to configure your site to stage a blackout, without having requiring significant reconfiguration of your website. Users attempting to view your website, would simply see an anti-SOPA message, which you can see a preview of.