[self moderated comment]

Look what you did Bill, you made my facebook feed full of rage posts and rants by confused people in the UK, I DISAPPROVE

Come to think of it, MegaLoader (?) was taken down for breaching DMCA(?) and not SOPA....am I right, if those acronomes are right?

It's Megaupload. The DMCA has been around since, like, 1994. Megaupload has been around for a while, at least a few years - Wiki says since 2005. As DEFRON said, there are a number of sites similar to Megaupload, and this might spell doom for them all.

I was told, since I don't use it, that it was closed because it was in breach of the DMCA in America, and that some of its owner/workers in New Zealand were arrested.
Isn't the DMCA a more effective SOPA with less negatives...

It's effective, but places the responsibility on the companies to scour the web and find all their stuff that's being pirated. The SOPA seems like, instead of sending a DMCA request to remove the pirated stuff, it'd make it possible to take down the whole site. I'm no expert on either, though, so maybe someone else can give some details regarding the differences.

Concidering Megaupload did comply with the DMCA, this was much closer to corporate assassination.
SOPA/PIPA/ACTA would make this possible without any need to involve any investigative agency.

Looks like Anon retalitated for the take down of Megaupload.
http://gizmodo.com/5877679/anonymous-kills-department-of-justice-site-in-megaupload-revenge-strike

I think that the Megaupload incident should provide more than enough evidence of reality here:

The US government already has the power to take down software counterfeiting (don't call it piracy, that plays right into the propaganda from the movie and music industry) which means that SOPA/PIPA are not necessary for the government to effectively protect copyrights.

That means that there must be some other reason that SOPA/PIPA are being pushed...

My fellow Americans, open your eyes! Your personal property rights are being attacked under the cover of anti-"Piracy" legislation. The Music and Movie industries want to eliminate the second-hand market for their products in order to monopolize the industries, but to do that they need to get laws passed that remove your Right of First Sale.

If my Congressmen vote "Yes" on any of these bills I will PERSONALLY run against them and I URGE you to do the same.

O.O Holy [censored] hell. DoJ, RIAA, EMI, MPAA, FBI, and the Copyright Office? All taken down? These people are gutsy...

In my opinion, the response is admirable, but the method is far from gutsy.

Is it possible we are seeing the first volleys of "WWIWI" (World-Wide-Internet-War-one)?

Well it is just crashing a website, it's not like they're hacking the FBI. http://xkcd.com/932/

Yeah... but that many websites? I was surprised at the number of websites...

Pretty much. I'm not much of an expert, though.

Not sure if this was posted but since an xkcd comic was mentioned it reminded me of one his http://xkcd.com/1005/ one.

Yeah they didn't do anything really serious, but the fact that 5,600 were doing it at once, at least at one point..is pretty amazing I think. I've never heard of that number retaliating over something but I don't know much about this DDOSing business.

A Dedicated Denial of Service (or DDoS) is an attack where the attacker uses a bot or zombie net (a network of computers that are unknowingly running malware that allows the attacker to issue a command and have all of the networked computers obey the command) to overflow a server's bandwidth so that the server is unable to handle any more incoming requests which essentially takes the server offline.

SOPA, if only in it's present form, is dead.

http://mashable.com/2012/01/20/sopa-is-dead-smith-pulls-bill/

Fantastic!

They've already tried saying this once and it turned out to just be an attempt to misdirect the public. I'm still wary of it resurfacing. Also, unless I'm very wrong, we've still got PIPA to contend with. This is far from over.

"The theft of America’s intellectual property costs the U.S. economy more than $100 billion annually and results in the loss of thousands of American jobs. Congress cannot stand by and do nothing while American innovators and job creators are under attack."

This sounds like hyperbole and fear mongering to me, and it also sounds like they aren't going to give up so easily. I expect SOPA v2.0 to be revealed within the next couple of months.

Megaupload one of the best free services, gone.

It seems after the arrests of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, global network attacks are nearly 24% above normal.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-57362437-256/anonymous-goes-nuclear-everybody-loses/?tag=mncol;1n

I assume this as well. As long as those guys are in office, this is never going to end. It will resurface with a different face or when the public least expected.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/248468/congress_puts_sopa_pipa_on_hold.htmlIt is not over though, as there will continue to be similar bills proposed and one will eventually pass; hopefully it can be one that is put together and written by people who know what they are dealing with and not ignorant congress people who don't know anything about the internet. Hopefully the general population will continue to resist bad laws and not get tired of Wiki shutting down everytime a new bill gets close to a vote. See Boy Who Cried Wolf.