Starting at midnight, Mozilla will join other leading Internet companies, public interest groups and citizens in opposing The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US House of Representatives. We’re censoring the Mozilla logo on many of our web sites as part of American Censorship Day and we sent Congressional leaders a joint letter together with AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Zynga raising our concerns with the bill.

This marks the first time we’ve come together with these giants of the Internet on any policy issue. The decision to inform legislators and users of our serious reservations with SOPA was a no-brainer and fell into place quickly over just a few days of discussion. We believe The Stop Online Piracy Act threatens our ability as an industry to continue to offer our many important software and web services to the hundreds of millions of users who rely on them, as well as the many employees and developers we support to innovate these technologies.

For Mozilla, we see this as a fight for the future of the Internet. Mozilla’s General Counsel, Harvey Anderson, blogged a few days ago that if the legislation were to pass into law it would likely chill free expression online, expose Internet users and companies to undue liability, be abused by plaintiffs, and still ultimately fail in its goal to thwart piracy.

We encourage you to take action today and tell your Congressional representatives how you feel about SOPA!

Here’s a copy of our letter to Congressional leaders:

Dear Chairman Leahy, Ranking Member Grassley, Chairman Smith and Ranking Member Conyers:

The undersigned Internet and technology companies write to express our concern with legislative measures that have been introduced in the United States Senate and United States House of Representatives, S. 968 (the “PROTECT IP Act”) and H.R. 3261 (the “Stop Online Piracy Act”).

We support the bills’ stated goals — providing additional enforcement tools to combat foreign “rogue” websites that are dedicated to copyright infringement or counterfeiting.  Unfortunately, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities, private rights of action, and technology mandates that would require monitoring of web sites.  We are concerned that these measures pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job-creation, as well as to our Nation’s cybersecurity. We cannot support these bills as written and ask that you consider more targeted ways to combat foreign “rogue” websites dedicated to copyright infringement and trademark counterfeiting, while preserving the innovation and dynamism that has made the internet such an important driver of economic growth and job creation.

One issue merits special attention. We are very concerned that the bills as written would seriously undermine the effective mechanism Congress enacted in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to provide a safe harbor for internet companies that act in good faith to remove infringing content from their sites.  Since their enactment in 1998, the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions for online service providers have been a cornerstone of the U.S. Internet and technology industry’s growth and success.  While we work together to find additional ways to target foreign rogue sites, we should not jeopardize a foundational structure that has worked for content owners and Internet companies alike and provides certainty to innovators with new ideas for how people create, find, discuss, and share information lawfully online.

We are proud to be part of an industry that has been crucial to U.S. economic growth and job creation. A recent McKinsey Global Institute Report found that the Internet accounts for 3.4 percent of GDP in the 13 countries that they studied, and, in the U.S., the Internet’s contribution to GDP is even larger. If Internet consumption and expenditure were a sector, its contribution to GDP would be bigger than energy, agriculture, communication, mining, or utilities. In addition, the Internet industry has increased productivity for small and medium-sized businesses by 10%.  We urge you not to risk either this success or the tremendous benefits these new platforms have brought to hundreds of millions of Americans and people around the world.

We stand ready to work with the Congress to develop targeted solutions to addressing the problem of foreign rogue websites.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Sincerely,

AOL
eBay
Facebook
Google
LinkedIn
Mozilla
Twitter
Yahoo!
Zynga

Additional links to the bill and other commentary can be found below:

• HR 3261 – SOPA Bill Text
• CDT – Growing Chorus of Opposition to “Stop Online Piracy Act”
• Professors’ Letter in Opposition to “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011” (PROTECT‐IP Act of 2011, S. 968)
• CNET -  SOPA: Hollywood’s latest effort to turn back time
• CNET – US Government Also a Villian in piracy act story
• EFF – SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet
• Corporate Law Report – SOPA? E-PARASITE Act? Whatever It’s Called, Here’s A Primer on the Latest in Protect IP
• Techdirt - An Open Letter To Chris Dodd: Silicon Valley Can’t Help Hollywood If You First Cripple It With Bad Regulation

Earlier this year, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership’s, set out to place five technologists in partner newsrooms through a selection process that included an open-call design challenge.  Selecting the final five was a joint process with our five news partners for 2011/12: Al Jazeera, the BBC, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, and Zeit Online. We proudly introduce:

From left to right: Cole, Nichola, Dan, Laurian & Mark

Mark Boas | Al Jazeera
Mark makes, teaches, writes about and promotes new and open web technologies. Co-founder of Happyworm, a tiny entrepreneurial web agency and makers of the jPlayer media framework, Mark enjoys pushing the limits of the browser with HTML5 and JavaScript. Though a generalist at heart, Mark spends much of his time playing with web based media and real-time communications. A lover of all things audio, his passion often drives his work and is currently enjoying the challenge of taking audio ‘somewhere new’ with his Hyperaudio experiments.

Cole Gillespe | Zeit Online
Cole Gillespie is a JavaScript developer originating from deep within the North Carolina Appalachians. In recent years he has spent his time in Raleigh, North Carolina, working with various companies including Project Mastermind, National Geographic, CNN and IBM. He spends most of his free time playing music, hacking open source projects or trolling in IRC trying to keep up with the web’s rapid evolution.

Laurian Grindloc | BBC
Laurian followed his interest in the semantic web through a master in Computational Linguistics and several years of research into semantic navigation at Knowledge Media Institute (The Open University). For the past year, Laurian has been implementing applications using semantic web technologies at the technology innovation company Talis.

Nicola Hughes | Guardian
After academic excursions in the fields of Physics, Zoology, Anthropology and Journalism, Nicola started her media career at CNN in London. Whilst working as a Digital Media Producer, she started blogging and tweeting about data journalism (@DataMinerUK). She left CNN to join a data scraping start up, ScraperWiki, and to gain coding skills. She is now taking her skills, perspectives and start-up mojo into the newsroom for testing.

Dan Schultz | Boston Globe
Dan Schultz is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab studying in the Information Ecology group. At the Lab he is a Research Associate at the Center for Civic Media and has learned how to make almost anything. Before coming to MIT Dan received a B.S. in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University, and was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007 to write about “Connecting People, Content, and Community.”

Through their tenure at the partner newsrooms in 2012, the fellows have been tasked with three things:

• To embed themselves within their partner newsrooms so that they become intimately familiar with the daily ebb and flow of some of the best newsrooms in the world
• To work in the open, in the spirit of Mozilla and the open-source community. That means blogging about their work and being active in communities outside their host newsroom as an advocate for open innovation.
• To release the code they create into the larger open-source and journalism communities. The goal is to benefit not only their host newsrooms but to make tools that benefit all of journalism and beyond.

Get more news, impressions, ideas from the Mozilla festival: Follow #mozfest on microblogs and the Mozilla Festival Blog.

Editor’s note: Today, Mozilla published a Do Not Track Field Guide and shared DNT adoption numbers to date. The full post is available on the Mozilla Privacy Blog. Excepted below.

Today we’re publishing our first edition of the The Do Not Track Field Guide. Based on interactions with developers from leading companies that support DNT today, The Do Not Track Field Guide contains case studies, tutorials and sample code. We’ve also included a background section on our view of what the debate over DNT is all about. We hope that the Guide inspires developers around the world to embrace the technology and also leads to subsequent editions with new tutorials and sample code.

 

Today we’re launching Web FWD (Web Forward), the community-driven innovation accelerator from Mozilla Labs. Web FWD supports Open Web innovators by providing a space at Mozilla where they can build their products. We are creating a workshop environment where bold ideas can be realized and bare-bones prototypes can develop and go forward as products.

How

We’ll host small teams at Mozilla’s global offices for four weeks at a time, giving them access to our people, tools and resources, so they can focus on building. We’re looking for playful, useful, original problem-solving applications and tools that make the Web a better place.

During the four week program, teams will work in-house alongside the Mozilla crew. You’ll receive mentorship and guidance from some of the brightest people around, allowing you to focus on bringing your product idea to life.

At the end of four weeks, you’ll have a minimum viable product ready to go out on the Open Web. And together we can decide on how to take this product forward.

What we offer

• The opportunity to work alongside the Mozilla crew in one of our offices
• Access to key Mozilla personnel, introductions to interesting people and industry leaders
• Regular mentorship sessions with experts on technology, scalability, security, marketing, community, and business strategy
• Financial support during the program
• Help with IT infrastructure (servers, software, etc.)
• A great coworking experience with plenty of fun & awesomeness!

What we look for

• The product fits into one of the predefined problem areas
• The product is developed with the traits that are important for the open Web
• The team has at least the kernel of a product (i.e. some working code, not only an idea)

The program runs on a rolling submission schedule with the first spots opening in August. Head over to the Mozilla Labs Web FWD site for more information and submit your application.

We’re excited that Twitter has released the Twitter Address Bar Search add-on to make it easy to complete Twitter searches in Firefox. With Twitter Address Bar Search, users can discover richer and more relevant Twitter search results directly from the Firefox Awesome Bar (Address Bar).

The add-on makes searching Twitter in Firefox a snap. You can search for #hashtags and @usernames by entering the searches directly into the Firefox Awesome Bar, and you’ll be taken to Twitter search results. Twitter Address Bar Search works with the latest version of Firefox for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and even on Android!

Mozilla is continually exploring innovative ways to put users in control of their online experience. With the Twitter Address Bar Search add-on, Twitter leverages the extensible Mozilla Firefox platform to deliver an integrated social experience to hundreds of millions of Firefox users worldwide.

Visit the Firefox Add-ons gallery to try out the Twitter Address Bar Search add-on. If you aren’t a Firefox user, you can download the Mozilla Firefox with Twitter bundle.

Editor’s note: Today, Mozilla, NVIDIA and YouTube announced support for 3D HTML5 video, available exclusively in Firefox. You can find the announcement here and read more details from Mozilla Director of Platform Product Management, Chris Blizzard, here. Below is an excerpt from the blog post.

Starting with Firefox 4, WebM videos encoded with 3D data will be displayed in high-quality stereoscopic 3D using NVIDIA 3D Vision hardware. 3D hardware has moved from movie theaters and into people’s homes through TVs, laptop and desktop machines. 3D video games are in wide use today. And consumer hardware that’s capable of capturing 3D photos and videos is starting to come onto the market. In fact, there are several thousand 3D videos available today on YouTube. And starting today YouTube will transcode and play these videos into the open WebM format with 3D for use with their HTML5 player. This feature is currently only available in Firefox 4. It’s our hope that other browsers will follow and add support for 3D HTML5 video as well.

This is part of our larger effort to bring open video to the Web. We’ve been glad to work with NVIDIA and YouTube on this project building the solution entirely on open standards like WebM and HTML5. Our hope is that by lowering the barrier for 3D video on the Web, we’ll see more interesting apps being build on open Web technologies.

We are excited to unveil the Web O’ Wonder website, showcasing cutting edge demos from the global Mozilla community. These shiny, new demos showcase the type of ingenuity and fun enabled by modern Web technologies.

Web O’ Wonder exhibits cool and creative ways to interact with the Web. The possibilities are unlimited, so get ready to explore the types of experiences created with modern Web technologies. This is just the beginning so check back often because we will add more demos to Web O’ Wonder each week.

In addition to the interactive demos, with Web O’ Wonder you can learn more about how each demo works, what technologies are used and check out behind the scenes video interviews with the creators.

You can read this blog post from Mozilla’s Technology Evangelist, Paul Rouget to learn more about Web O’ Wonder.

Video is an integral part of the modern web experience, which is why Mozilla has been working for the past few years to make sure that video can be used in the ways necessary to sustain the web’s incredible growth and generativity. Today we’re excited to join Google in announcing the WebM project to advance web video, including Google’s release of the VP8 codec under open source and royalty-free terms.

Since Mozilla first announced support for HTML5 video, we have worked to improve the performance, usability and capabilities of open video on the web. We’ve been grateful for the opportunity to support the visionary work of the Ogg Theora project, and in collaboration with them we’ve brought royalty-free web video to hundreds of millions of users around the world. Most recently, Mozilla commissioned work to provide hardware acceleration for Theora, making it dramatically more efficient on today’s mobile devices.

Until today, Theora was the only production-quality codec that was usable under terms appropriate for the open web. Now we can add another, in the form of VP8: providing better bandwidth efficiency than H.264, and designed to take advantage of hardware from mobile devices to powerful multicore desktop machines, it is a tremendous technology to have on the side of the open web. VP8 and WebM promise not only to commoditize state-of-the-art video quality, but also to form the basis of further advances in video for the web.

It is a great time to be a web developer, and there has never been a better time to be a supporter of open video on the web. Mozilla is very excited to be part of the WebM project, and to join with an impressive list of industry partners in advancing unencumbered, high-performance multimedia on the web. And, of course, we’re working to get this capability into the hands of 400M Firefox users on desktops and mobile devices alike.

Preview builds of Firefox with WebM support are available at http//nightly.mozilla.org/webm.