Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Wikipedia has several problems, but this is most definitely not one of them. I supported the community's decision to do this. Jimbo Wales has done a fair bit of attention-whoring for the media, as the Sole Founder, and he may be exploiting WP's SOPA blackout for the purposes of self-promotion (as he usually does). However, the blackout was not a unilateral decision by Jimbo or the WMF Board; it was a consensus decision made by English Wikipedians, and they are in the right on this issue. There is no excuse anymore for cowardly submission to violation of our civil liberties, and while I did not participate in the Wikipedia discussion (I left a comment on the blog in support of the decision) I am glad that Wikipedians did not let a commitment to "neutrality" repress their desire to take a stand. Making sharing a crime would be totalitarian. The out-of-touch politicians who insist on pushing this BS and the greedy companies that they serve don't seem to realize that they can't control the Internet. It is unrealistic to even try. Why can't they just accept that the strict definitions of creative content as "property" that they are clinging to have shifted, and can no longer be imposed on everything?
Those who wish to sign (one) petition to defend our rights to freely share creative material on the Internet can go
here.
Google also has a petition to stop SOPA/PIPA (available
here. One of its problems is that calls to "end piracy", which insinuates that file sharing is actually a detrimental problem and needs to be banned. The freedom to share artistic works (including music files and movies) online deserves protection, both from digital restrictions management and the government; this right is integral to the survival of a free and open commons on the internet.
Regardless of this problems, I did sign the petition, as I agree that large corporations and certain congresspeople are trying to sabotage our rights online with nasty laws like PIPA and SOPA. Even without these mean-spirited pieces of legislation, digital rights in the US are under threat (as was proven by the ridiculous
indictment of MegaUpload, who should have known better than to trust the US government). But that still doesn't mean SOPA and PIPA won't make it worse if passed, they almost surely will.
If passed, these pieces of legislation would affect more than just one specific country, because so many international websites are hosted in the US, and because SOPA specifically targets foreign websites for censorship in the US.
It heartens me to know that this assault on civil liberties hasn't gone unchallenged.