Scribd protests SOPA with disappearing act

Scribd, which has aimed to do for document sharing what Spotify has done for music, is protesting two bills in Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, by making some of the words in documents posted to its site disappear.

The site allows its members to post documents they’re reading or discussing, and the company is worried that the two bills — if broadly interpreted — could result in its site being pulled from the Web completely. “Congress is pushing through legislation that threatens the future of the Internet,” said Jared Friedman, CTO and co-founder of Scribd, in a statement. “With this legislation in place, entire domains like Scribd could simply vanish from the web. That’s why we’re showing our users just what SOPA and PIPA could do to Scribd and other sites. These bills aren’t just dry acronyms; they’re a direct attack on the underpinnings of the web.”