You Don’t Need Heaps of Facts for Online Bingo – we Know it Already!

Lucky for us there’s not much trivia in online bingo. We only need to master the art of the game and not any in depth historical facts, so we won’t have been too worried when the biggest online encyclopaedia ceased services for one day in protest of an American anti-piracy legislation.

Wikipedia, the website that needs no introduction left English speaking students and the fact seeking public without their services on Wednesday 18th January. The website instead had what they called a ‘day of darkness’ and displayed a blank page with the slogan “imagine a world without free knowledge”.

The anti-piracy laws that are being backed by much of the media, film and music industry as a step toward combating piracy has been condemned by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia as a way of “fatally damaging the free and open internet”. He claims that if this legislation goes ahead it will limit the informationthe general public are entitled to and will be a step toward to an absence of freedom of speech.

To raise awareness of the proposed action the online encyclopaedia, along with user generated sites such as Boing Boing and Reddit terminated their services for 24 hours. Boing Boing is even more open with their opinions claiming that the action would “kill us forever”, whilst search engine Google carries a message reading “please don’t censor the web”.

Wales, in a passionate statement on the terminated website stated that the Wiki team had “spent over a decade and millions of hours building what is now the largest encyclopaedia in human history”. He fears that if this bill is implemented it will set a “frightening precedent for internet censorship” and wants to raise awareness of the destructive bill via his site.Com Score, a media planning agency estimates that Wikipedia has approximately 326 million unique users a month and since its birth the encyclopaedia has been a helping hand to millions of fact checkers worldwide.
The bill, known as Sopa and its counterpart Pipa were formed to protect intellectual property in America though the Wiki team warn that it will be a worldwide problem as it will severely limit online information. The laws purport that anyone guilty of streaming copyrighted content more than ten times within a six month period would face a jail sentence and any site enabling such piracy would be shut down.

The bills have huge support from much of Hollywood and are being hailed as the battle between Hollywood glamour and Silicon Valley technology in America. Media tyrant Rupert Murdoch is a supporter of the law and has publicly criticised the White House for not supporting extreme versions of the Sopa bill. This week he tweeted that he “doesn’t care if people don’t buy his newspapers” he just wants them to stop stealing them.

If the bill goes ahead it won’t limit your ability to play online bingo, don’t worry about that but it may limit your options of viewing your favourite TV programmes or listening to music, blogging might also be censored. Even if you’re not American it will affect what you can and cannot view online but rest assured your favourite free bingo sites will still be there for your entertainment, you will still be able to win a buck or two to pay for your piracy fines, only joking!

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