Website Blocked,' said one banner, found on the site of TechDirt. To educate Web surfers and get them to contact Congress in opposition of the bill, many sites were featuring the pop-up protest banners. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, and other Internet companies oppose the measure, arguing that SOPA would force changes to the DNS and effectively create a blacklist of domains suspected of intellectual property violations, among other complaints. The measure would allow the Justice Department to serve court orders on ISPs, domain name system (DNS) providers, and search engines and ask them to cut off foreign 'rogue' Web sites accused of infringing copyrighted material. Hollywood studios, the recording industry, large content holders and the U.S.Copyright Office back the measure, arguing that it is needed to curb online piracy. The House of Representatives held its first hearing on the controversial bill today. The big pop-ups with a darkened background urge people to contact Congress and express opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In honor of 'American Censorship Day,' some Web sites were symbolically blacking out their front pages today. But the protests were interfering with some Web surfers. Web sites opposed to a federal anti-piracy bill were coming up with some innovative ways of protesting the proposed law, which they claim would allow for Internet censorship. This is an example of the anti-SOPA pop-up banners that Web sites were displaying today.

Surfers web