Today, we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to touch on an issue that is important to us at JESS3 and should be to anyone who works and plays on the internet.

Instead of posting our usual Mobile Uploads round-up, we’ve decided to round up some of the actions our team members are taking to protest the dangerous SOPA and PIPA initiatives.

Trey Long, JESS3’s Director of Engineering says: “The best way to affect change in this country is to vote. But not by casting a ballot, no, by voting with your wallet. Capitalism says your money talks and at JESS3 that’s what we’re doing.” Under Trey’s leadership, we’ve transferred 175 domains from GoDaddy, an early supporter of SOPA, to Namecheap. It should be noted Namecheap put its money where its mouth was: they gave a special deal to folks transferring domain names from GoDaddy and donated $2/domain to the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which resulted in a $60k donation.

Bonnie Aumann, JESS3’s Technical Director wrote to both her senators in PA and says she is also moving her GoDaddy services to another provider.

Brad Cohen, JESS3’s Director of Strategy wrote a blog post on the issue both on the JESS3 blog a few weeks ago and on his personal blog today, blacked out his Facebook profile (see above), and called Oregon public officials. “Most of them out here are already on the right side of this,” he says.

Nikki Galvan, a Producer at JESS3, weighed in as well: “Personally, I’ve signed every petition since it was public and made calls to the local reps in Maryland. I’ve also posted on Twitter and Facebook about it consistently. Hope it gets killed like it should have been months ago!”

Some of our friends on the web made some pretty awesome statements, as well: m ss ng p eces created this beautiful, informative video, Buzzfeed did a great roundup of prominent web properties that went “dark” in protest and one of our part-time partners in crime Greg Leuch created an awesome plugin to help users blackout their content in protest of SOPA.

If you’re wondering what the author of this blog post did, well, I signed the online petition at americancensorship.org, and made a bad SOPA/PIPA joke on Twitter.

What did you do to protest SOPA/PIPA today?

Tags: censorship, mobile uploads, pipa, SOPA, team