Bevan Rudge JavaScript and web technologist

Over the last week Twitter and Facebook users across New Zealand and the world, have been blacking out their avatars in protest of S92A, a change in New Zealand's copyright law that will require ISPs to disconnect any user accused of copyright infringement. No proof or evidence is required, just accusation. This is a terrible law for many reasons, which are well documented on CreativeFreedom.org.nz, and elsewhere.

UPDATE: Internet Blackout NZ is thus far successful. We successfully delayed changes to Section 92A for 4 weeks! It is expected that this will give the new New Zealand government time to fully understand the ridiculousness of the law change, and dismiss it entirely. See my latest blog post for more details.

The online protest stimulated and supported a physical protest in Wellington outside the Beehive (beehive.govt.nz is a Drupal website) (NZ's parliamentary buildings) last Thursday. It inspired others to follow-up with a website blackout event today, Monday 23 February. I already partially blacked out my blog last week, however this blackout will be more thorough than my website-decolouration or 'grey-out'.

UPDATE: This is what drupal.geek.nz looked like during the week of February 16-23:

Click for full size

I have created a Drupal module to help any Drupal websites owners quickly blackout their website, if they want to participate. Currently it's only a Drupal 6 module, however if anyone really wants it for their Drupal 5 website and doesn't have the technical skills to backport it, I may help out with this.

The Internet Blackout NZ module blacks out a Drupal website with a link to Creative Freedom's post about the issue and event. Some pages are not blacked out, so that the module can be disabled; user, user/*, admin and admin/*. The list of pages NOT blacked out is configurable, as is the blackout page title, link, content and CSS. See the module's README.txt or the project page for instructions.