SOPA Activist and RSS author Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit, has been found dead in his Brooklyn, NY apartment, from a hanging suicide. The 26 year-old was facing Federal prosecution for allegedly stealing 4.8 million documents from MIT’s computer networks, as well as from JSTOR, or Journal Storage, a nonprofit organization that offers journals and scholarly books to subsidized institutions. The death came as a shock to Swartz’s parents and girlfriend, who never expected him to hang himself, and they contend that the suicide was as a result of a “criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”

The Internet protests to the proposed anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA, including the ‘blackouts’ by sites like Wikipedia, and protest-filled homepages of sites like Craigslist, have had a real impact. So real, in fact, that the status of SOPA and PIPA is that they are now effectively dead.

If you are wondering whether Wikipedia is down – and you find yourself wondering this on January 18, 2012, then Wikipedia may indeed be down, but it is a planned Wikipedia blackout, to protest SOPA (even though it has been killed) and PIPA (which will hopefully suffer the same fate).

Federal House Bill HR 3261 is pending Federal legislation that would create the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). SOPA is generating a lot of buzz because those for it and those against it are so radically opposed. As one might expect, those pushing for the adoption of SOPA include the biggies in the entertainment industry, such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). But those who oppose it include people and organizations with a deep understanding of how the Internet works – and of how the Internet could be broken – and innocent sites shut down – by SOPA as it currently is written.