The Stop Online Piracy Act, the Internet's least favorite piece of legislation, may have been tabled in Congress until later this month. But the much-hated bill's opponents aren't wasting time in mobilizing anti-SOPA forces to boycott and protest SOPA-supporting companies. Now two coders have released a tool designed to make clear exactly who those pro-SOPA targets include.
No SOPA, an extension program for Google's Chrome browser, warns users every time they visit a site owned by a company that supports SOPA, throwing up a red bar at the top of the browser that reads "SOPA Supporter! This company is a known supporter of the dangerous ‘Stop Online Piracy Act.’"
The plug-in doesn't block those SOPA-supporting sites. But the tool's creators, two Minneapolis programmers named Andy Baird and Tony Webster, have some suggestions about how users ought to proceed. "Boycott? Nasty letter time?" they write in the tool's description. "You decide."
No SOPA takes its blacklist from media sources, and Baird and Webster say they'll continually update it with suggestions from users to the tool's page on Github, a platform for open source software. As of today, the add-on seems to flag 333 sites as SOPA friendly, from industry groups like the Motion Picture Association of America to the Business Software Alliance, to companies like Apple.com to Nintendo.com, to Newscorp-owned sites like Fox.com and Sky.com.
Angry users have already shifted several companies' stances on the copyright-enforcing bill, which has been called a censorship tool and an obstacle to improving Internet security. After Microsoft was accused of supporting the bill, it lobbied the BSA to change its tune on the legislation, according to CNet. And GoDaddy, facing a massive backlash and boycott, quickly dropped its support for the bill late last month. (Though that hasn't kept Baird and Webster from including GoDaddy on its list, perhaps a sign the tool will be slow to update.)
No SOPA isn't the first browser plug-in to function as a protest tool. Murdoch Block, a Firefox add-on released last summer at the height of Newscorp's phone hacking scandal, blacklisted all sites owned by the media conglomerate. And late last month, a coder named Tamer Rizk offered another Firefox plug-in designed to circumvent SOPA's DNS filtering if the law should ever come to pass.
Download the No SOPA Chrome extension here.
