On January 18, 2012, Wikipedia participated in a protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by blacking out its landing page for an entire twenty-four hours and posting the message “Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge.” SOPA, proposed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2011 to expand the government’s ability to protect copyrighted intellectual property online, threatens services like Wikipedia that rely on a free and open Internet.