This afternoon, our friends at The New York Tech Meetup took the protest against wide-ranging anti-piracy bills to the streets of Manhattan. Hundreds of the city’s tech community turned out for a demonstration in Midtown, outside the offices of Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. The rally was to voice opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (PIPA).
The Tech Meetup teamed up with Mobile Commons to encourage protesters to call the senators’ offices just by texting the word PIPA to 877877.
Speakers at the rally included Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, technology thinker Clay Shirkey and others from the city’s tech startup world.
Online anti-SOPA/PIPA protests drew media attention across the world, as sites like Wikipedia and Reddit replaced their usual content with calls for protest. Tumblr gave its users the option to turn their pages into forms where people could call members of congress to complain about the bills, using Mobile Commons technology.
Mobile Commons overheard one formally dressed passerby ask curiously, “What’s PIPA?” followed by “Oh, that’s why I can’t access Wikipedia.”