We are less than a few hours away from the begin­ning of the biggest vir­tu­al grass­roots protest the Inter­net has ever seen. 

As you may have heard, the Web — or at least a siz­able frac­tion of it — is going on strike to protest two destruc­tive bills pend­ing before Con­gress that would allow giant media con­glom­er­ates to start using the Depart­ment of Jus­tice like their own pri­vate law firm, black­list­ing and dis­con­nect­ing any sites they accuse of per­pet­u­at­ing or facil­i­tat­ing copy­right infringe­ment. These bills are known as SOPA (the “Stop Online Pira­cy Act”) and PIPA (the “Pro­tect Intel­lec­tu­al Property/IP Act”). They have many sup­port­ers in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and the Sen­ate.

To raise aware­ness of the harm these bills would cause and high­light why they must be stopped, a num­ber of major web­sites are plan­ning to go on strike tomor­row, replac­ing their nor­mal home pages with a call to action against SOPA and PIPA. Red­dit launched the day of action last week, and it has since snow­balled, with Wikipedia com­mit­ting itself to par­tic­i­pate yes­ter­day. Since then, dozens more com­pa­nies, non­prof­its, and ser­vices have con­firmed their intent to join in in some way, going either com­plete­ly or par­tial­ly dark.

Word­Press (which pow­ers many of NPI’s sites), The Inter­net Archive, Dias­po­ra*, and Identi.ca are among the lat­est notable ser­vices to com­mit, join­ing thou­sands of oth­er sites, includ­ing NPI’s net­work.

Oth­er pro­gres­sive orga­ni­za­tions shut­ting down their sites include the Net­roots Foun­da­tion (which orga­nizes Net­roots Nation) and Raw Sto­ry.

Oth­er sites are stay­ing online, but post­ing alerts or notices for their users, urg­ing them to take action to defeat SOPA and PIPA. Craigslist has already placed a promi­nent alert on its many metro hubs. Scribd, which calls itself the world’s largest online doc­u­ment repos­i­to­ry, plans to acti­vate an anti-SOPA/PI­PA pop­up that vis­i­tors to its net­work will see when attempt­ing to access documents.

And OpenDNS, the world’s largest inde­pen­dent DNS provider, has announced it will join in the protest by ran­dom­ly cen­sor­ing results returned by the OpenDNS guide.

Google plans to par­tic­i­pate in its own way. The com­pa­ny is not tak­ing any ser­vices offline, but it will be putting a link to an anti-SOPA page on google.com (like­ly under­neath the search box) which is bound to receive mil­lions of clicks.

Mean­while, the list of oppo­nents to SOPA and PIPA in Con­gress con­tin­ues to grow. Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Scott Brown of Mass­a­chu­setts declared his oppo­si­tion today, as did Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Tim Ryan of Ohio.

Wash­ing­ton’s two largest tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies have not been at the fore­front of the fight against SOPA and PIPA, but in state­ments sent to Geek­Wire today, Ama­zon and Microsoft have made it clear they are also opposed.

A num­ber of promi­nent musi­cians, break­ing with the RIAA and MPAA, have declared their sol­i­dar­i­ty with oppo­nents of PIPA and SOPA, includ­ing Peter Gabriel and MC Ham­mer. Gabriel is black­ing out his own site tomor­row as part of the strike.

In con­cert with the black­out, sev­er­al groups are orga­niz­ing in-per­son protests to lob­by mem­bers of Con­gress. The New York Tech Meet­up will be hold­ing an emer­gency gath­er­ing tomor­row out­side of the offices of Sen­a­tors Kris­ten Gilli­brand and Chuck Schumer (who are both cospon­sors of PIPA) in Man­hat­tan to urge them to recon­sid­er their posi­tions. A sim­i­lar gath­er­ing is being planned in San Fran­cis­co.

Hap­pi­ly, the black­out appears to already be achiev­ing its intend­ed pur­pose. The MPAA, now chaired by for­mer sen­a­tor and Hol­ly­wood tool Chris Dodd, has just released a state­ment denounc­ing the protest, call­ing it “anoth­er gim­mick, albeit a dan­ger­ous one, designed to pun­ish elect­ed and admin­is­tra­tion officials.”

So by choos­ing to exer­cise our First Amend­ment rights, we’re pun­ish­ing our elect­ed lead­ers? Caus­ing may­hem? By that log­ic, what is the MPAA’s inces­sant lob­by­ing of our elect­ed lead­ers equiv­a­lent to? Torture?