Even though opponents of the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) won a big victory on Friday when it was announced that the DNS blocking provision would be removed from the bill, it looks like the idea of shutting down web sites to protest the bill is gaining steam.
We have already reported that Reddit plans to shut down for 12 hours on Wednesday, January 18 in their own SOPA protest. Now Marcus "Notch" Persson, the creator of the hit PC game Minecraft, has announced via his Twitter page, "We"ll silently take down https://minecraft.net and https://mojang.com on the 18th in protest of SOPA."
Shacknews also reports that Red 5 Studios, the game developer behind the upcoming free-to-play shooter Firefall, will shut down the Firefall web site and its current closed beta test for 24 hours on January 18. In addition, Red 5 Studios has said they have canceled their plans to attend E3 in June. E3 is run by the Entertainment Software Association which supports SOPA.
While the ESA is supporting the legislation, at least three of ESA"s members have openly come out against SOPA. Graphics chip maker NVIDIA posted word on its blog site that it does not support SOPA saying, "NVIDIA wasn’t consulted by ESA in formulating their position on SOPA." In addition Epic Games states in its forum pages, "... we do not support the current version of SOPA." Finally another ESA member, game developer 38 Studios, says in its own forum post, " ... we cannot in good conscience support the SOPA legislation as it"s currently written." Finally the well know gaming news web site Destructoid has announced it will go dark on Wednesday for its own SOPA protest.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has indicated he is in favor of Wikipedia joining the Wednesday protests but added, " ... I"d like to talk to our government affairs adviser to see if they agree on this as useful timing."
Update: PC gaming download site GoG.com and Halo creator Bungie have officially announced their opposition to SOPA. The Obama administration has also posted up a note from three of its official that also oppose SOPA.