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AmazingSuperPowers has gone dark on January 18, 2012 from 8:00am to 8:00pm EST to protest SOPA/PIPA and Internet Censorship. This site is offline and there will be no comic.

This is a real deal issue, something that actually affects the site and our livelihood as content creators. It affects you too! If you’re not familiar with what’s going on, please check out one or more of the following links, and consider contacting your representatives so the voice of reason can be heard.

Don't worry, the site isn't actually blocked. But it could be in the future. Under PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), two bills being seriously considered in the United States, websites which contain or link to copyrighted material (even if posted by a user of the site) can be indefinitely blocked without trial or notice.

Doing Cyanide & Happiness for all these years has been a dream come true for us. But the sad truth is that if SOPA and PIPA were passed 10 years ago, Cyanide & Happiness almost certainly wouldn't exist. The four of us who write and draw the comics met each other, and found our first handful of fans, at the website NewGrounds.com. NewGrounds is an animation portal which celebrates parody and derivative works, and as such often struggles with users breaking copyright.

Usually when this happens it's the job of the offended party to have the content removed, as you've probably seen on YouTube many times. These two bills would instead allow the entire site to be blocked.

Without user content portals like NewGrounds and YouTube, the Internet becomes just another mainstream media outlet, instead of the wild proving ground of ideas that allows regular people like us to find a large audience.

Please, if you live in the United States, do everything you can to prevent this.



Here are a few easy things you can do:

Educate yourself about how SOPA and PIPA work.
Print and mail letters to your state's senators and representatives, urging them not to support this. Physical mail is harder to ignore than email. It piles up. You can find representatives' addresses here and senators' addresses here. Remember that PIPA is a Senate bill and SOPA is a House of Representatives bill.
Call your senators and representatives on the phone and urge them not to support the bills. See above links for phone numbers or click here to get a quick list of representatives based on where you live.

Let your elected representatives know, as inconveniently as possible, that censoring the Internet is something you do not and cannot support. Congressmen care about getting reelected. If everyone reading this plays their part, these bills will be killed.

If you want to blackout your own site, feel free to use any elements from this page.

Explosm will return to normal tomorrow.

SMBC has been censored by the
United States Government


Okay, not really.


But there is legislation right now that could make this sort of thing possible. You may think your government is above censoring comic strips for nerds,
but actually, it's happened before.

Please take a moment to read up on some more current concerns:

If you're not aware of SOPA / PIPA, there are articles on wikipedia here:
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) | Protect IP Act (PIPA)

If you want a tl;dr version, go here.

If you want to know who supports, who opposes, and who receives money, go here.


If you want to make a difference, here's what you can do:

1) Look up your congressperson or senator, and see if he/she supports or opposes.
For SOPA: projects.propublica.org/sopa/
For PIPA: projects.propublica.org/sopa/pipa#roll_call
2) Click the appropriate picture to pull up contact information.
3) Write a handwritten letter describing why you're unhappy. This is the best way to get their attention.
4) If you don't have time for that, call their office and politely but firmly express your complaint, specifically mentioning their support for SOPA (house of reps) or PIPA (senate).

Eärendil wrote:

Noobert wrote:Thank God for living in Canada. amirite?

First the bill for imprisonment for eternity, and now this? God save the Queen, I think?

Canuckland won't save you

xDaku wrote:https://twitter.com/herpderpedia

On the other end of the spectrum...

Zeratul wrote:Pirate bay's press release was interesting to read... http://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/sopa.txt