Internet Blackout NZ

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.

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'.

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.