James Allworth and Maxwell Wessel profile the corporations behind the legislation:
If you take a look at many of the largest backers of SOPA and PIPA — the Business of Software Alliance, Comcast, Electronic Arts, Ford, L'Oreal, Scholastic, Sony, Disney — you'll see that they represent a wide range of businesses. Some are technology companies, some are content companies, some are historic innovators, and some are not. But one characteristic is the same across all of SOPA's supporters — they all have an interest in preserving the status quo.
If there is meaningful innovation by startups in content creation and delivery, the supporters of SOPA and PIPA are poised to lose.
Even for those SOPA supporters that are historic innovators, their organizations focus on improving products in the pursuit of profit. They innovate to increase prices and limit production cost. Even when new models and technologies give rise to huge businesses, these incumbent firms reject meaningful innovation. On the other side of the debate, you'll see a few [of] the most successful companies in recent history. Wikipedia. Google. Twitter. Zynga. What these firms have in common is they have upended entire industries — and many are still in the process of doing so.
Brian Ries sat down with organizers from mega-sites Reddit and Cheezburger to discuss their "battle plan":
"I want people to understand," [Cheezburger's Ben] Huh assured me. “We’re not here to turn off the entire Internet. What we’re looking for is a diversity of responses. We need some people to shut down. We need some people to freak somebody out. What we really want to do is shock and awe. We want to wake up the public that had no idea this was going on so they can call their senators and say ‘No on PIPA.'"
Contact your senator here. Earlier coverage of today's web protests here.
The Dish 