Yesterday, we blacked out the default start page in Firefox and redirected visitors to the Mozilla sites to a special action page. We also sent direct messages to members of the Mozilla community through multiple online channels. All these steps were aimed at informing and mobilizing millions of people on the poorly drafted anti-piracy legislation – SOPA and PIPA – pending in Congress.

The result: Mozilla reached over 40 million people who, in turn, generated 360,000 emails sent to Senators and Representatives in Congress.

Here’s the breakdown of the stats from yesterday’s remarkable campaign:

• Approximately 30 million people in the US who use the default start page in Firefox received the blacked out page with our call to action
• We sent messages out to almost 9 million people via Facebook, Twitter and our Firefox + You newsletter
• Our messages were retweeted, shared and liked by over 20,000 people (not counting MC Hammer’s tweet to his 2.4 million followers!)
• 1.8 million people came to mozilla.org/sopa to learn more and take action on the issue
• 600,000 went on to visit the Strike Against Censorship page, hosted by the EFF
• Ultimately, 360,000 emails were sent by Mozillians to members of Congress, contributing a third of all the emails generated by EFF’s campaign site.

The debate is far from over. There’s a vote next week in the Senate. Keep the pressure on and make sure your elected officials understand the nuance of the issue and the importance of protecting the open Web.

Starting at 8:00 am Eastern tomorrow, Mozilla will join with other sites in a virtual strike to protest the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). These bills protect content at all costs, creating the opportunity for abuse and damaging the Web for all of us.

We will be blacking out the default start page in Firefox and redirecting key Mozilla websites to a special action page. Both steps are aimed at informing and mobilizing millions of our users on this important issue.

Mozilla’s Chairwoman Mitchell Baker has a blog post that further explains our concerns with the legislation, using a powerful analogy from the physical world to highlight how misdirected PIPA and SOPA are at this point.

These steps are complimentary to those participants in tomorrow’s online protest who are focusing on taking websites offline. We’re giving this degree of in-product visibility on PIPA/SOPA with the hope that this precedent-setting move will motivate people to ask their Congressional representatives to carefully consider all the facts and viewpoints before moving either of these bills forward.

This campaign will not effect people’s experience with Firefox, however, we hope it raises awareness and engagement. We’ll return people’s default start page and stop redirecting traffic at 8:00 pm Eastern tomorrow.

Mozilla Timeline on SOPA/PIPA

From the beginning, Mozilla has been a key force in rallying opposition to PIPA and SOPA.  On Nov 16, as part of the American Censorship campaign, Mozilla censored its logo and used the power of our start page in Firefox to engage our community. The results were awesome, generating thousands of emails and calls to Congress, and helped change the tenor of the public debate in the House.

November 2011

• General Counsel Harvey Anderson’s first warning to Mozilla community of the pitfalls of the proposed legislation
• Mozilla hosts planning meeting for Silicon Valley companies, startups, academics and NGOs to discuss response to SOPA/PIPA
• Mozilla censors its logo and directs web site traffic and Firefox users to take action in the House on SOPA, raising awareness on the bills with hundreds of millions of our users
• Mozilla releases a joint letter with Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, AOL and Yahoo!
• Mozillians attend SOPA hearing in DC and visit offices in the House to voice our concerns with the bill
• Mozilla leaders meet with numerous House and Senate members and their staff to explain our concerns about the bills

December 2011

• Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker co-authors an open letter to Washington with 16 other Internet leaders and founders
• Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs goes to the White House to discuss SOPA/PIPA with Obama Administration
• Mozillians continue meeting with House and Senate members and their staff to explain impacts to openness, free expression and security

January 2012

• Mozilla joins with other sites in a virtual strike to protest the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
• Chairwoman Mitchell Baker blogs about Mozilla’s stance on PIPA/SOPA
• Mozilla CEO, Gary Kovacs blogs about PIPA/SOPA

“We urge Congress to think hard before changing the regulation that underpins the Internet. Let’s not deny the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders the same opportunities that we all had.”

That’s the conclusion of a letter that went to the Hill today signed by seventeen Internet company founders and leaders, including Sergey Brin, Reid Hoffman, Arianna Huffington, Brewster Kahle, Jerry Yang and Mozilla’s own Mitchell Baker. The letter asks that members of Congress recognize the unintended consequences of legislation aimed at combating online piracy.

The controversial bills in question are the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP in the House and Senate, respectively. Mozilla has been working closely with many leading organizations and companies to communicate our concerns with the bills to policy makers in Washington. (See our previous post for more information.)

Just this week, we sent our CEO Gary Kovacs to the White House to discuss alternative approaches to combating online piracy and addressing the specific problem of “rogue sites.” We also signed onto two other letters to the Hill  supporting consideration of the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act, which was introduced last week as a viable alternative to tackling overseas copyright infringement.

Finally, a big “thank you” to all our users and community members! When we asked you to get involved in this issue a few weeks ago, we were blown away by the response. We overheard a Hill staffer at the initial House hearing on SOPA say “the Internet is on fire today.” That was hundreds of thousands of you contacting your representatives with your concerns over the impact of SOPA and PIPA to the Net.

Keep the pressure on. Let your members of Congress know you’re still concerned!A new organization called Engine Advocacy is running a campaign for you to “Add Your Voice and Protect Internet Innovation.”

Starting at midnight, Mozilla will join other leading Internet companies, public interest groups and citizens in opposing The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US House of Representatives. We’re censoring the Mozilla logo on many of our web sites as part of American Censorship Day and we sent Congressional leaders a joint letter together with AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Zynga raising our concerns with the bill.

This marks the first time we’ve come together with these giants of the Internet on any policy issue. The decision to inform legislators and users of our serious reservations with SOPA was a no-brainer and fell into place quickly over just a few days of discussion. We believe The Stop Online Piracy Act threatens our ability as an industry to continue to offer our many important software and web services to the hundreds of millions of users who rely on them, as well as the many employees and developers we support to innovate these technologies.

For Mozilla, we see this as a fight for the future of the Internet. Mozilla’s General Counsel, Harvey Anderson, blogged a few days ago that if the legislation were to pass into law it would likely chill free expression online, expose Internet users and companies to undue liability, be abused by plaintiffs, and still ultimately fail in its goal to thwart piracy.

We encourage you to take action today and tell your Congressional representatives how you feel about SOPA!

Here’s a copy of our letter to Congressional leaders:

Dear Chairman Leahy, Ranking Member Grassley, Chairman Smith and Ranking Member Conyers:

The undersigned Internet and technology companies write to express our concern with legislative measures that have been introduced in the United States Senate and United States House of Representatives, S. 968 (the “PROTECT IP Act”) and H.R. 3261 (the “Stop Online Piracy Act”).

We support the bills’ stated goals — providing additional enforcement tools to combat foreign “rogue” websites that are dedicated to copyright infringement or counterfeiting.  Unfortunately, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities, private rights of action, and technology mandates that would require monitoring of web sites.  We are concerned that these measures pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job-creation, as well as to our Nation’s cybersecurity. We cannot support these bills as written and ask that you consider more targeted ways to combat foreign “rogue” websites dedicated to copyright infringement and trademark counterfeiting, while preserving the innovation and dynamism that has made the internet such an important driver of economic growth and job creation.

One issue merits special attention. We are very concerned that the bills as written would seriously undermine the effective mechanism Congress enacted in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to provide a safe harbor for internet companies that act in good faith to remove infringing content from their sites.  Since their enactment in 1998, the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions for online service providers have been a cornerstone of the U.S. Internet and technology industry’s growth and success.  While we work together to find additional ways to target foreign rogue sites, we should not jeopardize a foundational structure that has worked for content owners and Internet companies alike and provides certainty to innovators with new ideas for how people create, find, discuss, and share information lawfully online.

We are proud to be part of an industry that has been crucial to U.S. economic growth and job creation. A recent McKinsey Global Institute Report found that the Internet accounts for 3.4 percent of GDP in the 13 countries that they studied, and, in the U.S., the Internet’s contribution to GDP is even larger. If Internet consumption and expenditure were a sector, its contribution to GDP would be bigger than energy, agriculture, communication, mining, or utilities. In addition, the Internet industry has increased productivity for small and medium-sized businesses by 10%.  We urge you not to risk either this success or the tremendous benefits these new platforms have brought to hundreds of millions of Americans and people around the world.

We stand ready to work with the Congress to develop targeted solutions to addressing the problem of foreign rogue websites.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Sincerely,

AOL
eBay
Facebook
Google
LinkedIn
Mozilla
Twitter
Yahoo!
Zynga

Additional links to the bill and other commentary can be found below:

• HR 3261 – SOPA Bill Text
• CDT – Growing Chorus of Opposition to “Stop Online Piracy Act”
• Professors’ Letter in Opposition to “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011” (PROTECT‐IP Act of 2011, S. 968)
• CNET -  SOPA: Hollywood’s latest effort to turn back time
• CNET – US Government Also a Villian in piracy act story
• EFF – SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet
• Corporate Law Report – SOPA? E-PARASITE Act? Whatever It’s Called, Here’s A Primer on the Latest in Protect IP
• Techdirt - An Open Letter To Chris Dodd: Silicon Valley Can’t Help Hollywood If You First Cripple It With Bad Regulation

Mozilla’s Do Not Track privacy feature in Firefox provides users more control over online behavioral tracking. Two developments bring it closer to being respected by industry.

Mozilla is a nonprofit organization committed to making the Web better and putting users in control of their Web experience. As part of this mission, we’re developing and implementing technologies that give people easy and effective privacy controls.

Mozilla introduced the Do Not Track (DNT) HTTP header approach in January and launched the feature in Firefox 4. We’ve worked closely with more than fifty leading companies and trade groups to help devise ways to implement DNT and offer users more control over how their browsing behavior is tracked and used online. Mozilla is working with the W3C and IETF organizations to standardize the DNT header, and we were pleased to see Microsoft subsequently include the mechanism in Internet Explorer 9.

To provide users more choice and control over online behavioral tracking, it’s essential that publishers and advertisers adopt and implement Web technologies that respect consumers’ wishes to not be tracked across their Web properties and services.

Today there are two significant developments on this front:

• The AP News Registry service, run by the Associated Press, implemented the DNT header across 800 news sites servicing 175 million unique visitors each month.
• The Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), which includes the five major media and advertising agencies, is initiating a process to explore incorporating the DNT header, as proposed by Mozilla, into its Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA). The DAA represents more than 5,000 leading media and technology companies that span the entire marketing-media ecosystem.

The Associated Press (AP) is the first company to deploy DNT on a large scale, and it only took a few hours for one engineer to implement. The AP News Registry tracks 1 billion impressions of news content, with 175 million unique visitors per month, and has membership with more than 800 sites. When consumers send a DNT preference via the browser while viewing a story at one of its publisher’s sites, the AP News Registry no longer sets any cookies. The previous solution was for users to opt-out via a link to a central opt-out page referenced in each participating news site’s privacy policy. They still count the total number of impressions for each news story, but aggregate consumer data for those with DNT in a non-identifiable way.

Since Mozilla issued the DNT proposal in late January, we have been engaged in productive and fruitful discussions on DNT with stakeholders across the industry, including the major trade groups and publishers. The turning point in the discussion came a few weeks ago, following a presentation from the FTC and ensuing industry call to discuss melding browser-based DNT implementations with self-regulation. Just last week, the leaders of the five groups that make up the DAA approved moving forward with determining how to include the header into its existing program. As a result, Mozilla is beginning an effort to collaborate with the DAA and other stakeholders to explore both business and technical requirements to further support broad implementation of the DNT header.

About Do Not Track and Firefox

With the integration of the DNT into Firefox, users can now check a “Do Not Track” box in the “Advanced” screen of Firefox “Options” (PC) or “Preferences” (Mac). When DNT is enabled, a signal sent via an HTTP header tells websites and third parties that the user wishes to opt-out of online behavioral tracking.

We’ll continue working with our users, online advertisers, publishers, developers, consumer groups and policy makers to flesh out DNT implementations and ensure DNT evolves into a meaningful tool for enhancing consumer privacy online. We believe the HTTP header is a constructive approach and one of the many areas we’re exploring to put users in control of their Web experience.

Alex Fowler