The EFF publicly thanks Reddit for its efforts to defeat SOPA

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s activism team has personally posted on Reddit to thank the service and the users of the service for everything that they have done to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act. From the GoDaddy SOPA support incident to the Reddit blackout, the EFF says that Reddit’s support had a ‘major impact’ on the fate of the issue.

Hey Reddit! This is EFF’s activism team (Rainey Reitman, Eva Galperin, Trevor Timm, and Parker Higgins). Reddit was one of the first online communities to realize SOPA and PIPA were horrible, bad, terrible ideas (even worse than ice-soap), and we wanted to say thanks for all you did in protest.

Whether it was pressuring Go Daddy to switch sides, convincing members of Congress to do the same, or being the first website to announce you’d black out on January 18th, your actions clearly had a major impact in the debate.

So we made you a present: http://imgur.com/IPoHW

The team is currently conducting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) discussion on Reddit which can be viewed here. They’re answering questions about the legislation, what can be done to stop copyright legislation like SOPA from passing in the future and more. Despite the obvious legal disclaimers, there is a lot of knowledge being dispensed here and its well worth a look for anyone interested in the issues.

The EFF is a non-profit that is dedicated to protecting ‘digital rights’. The organization provided this appropriate gift to the Redditors:

The bill succumbed recently to intense public pressure, with some even calling it unconstitutional. Protests all around the largest properties on the Internet raised a major stink, with Twitter clocking in some 3.9M Tweets in one day, Wikipedia blocking access to its site, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg publicly opposing the bill and Google going dark over it.

Reddit also went dark in protest of SOPA and its co-founder Alexis Ohanion talked to us about why it must be stopped and we must protect against it in the future.

The bill, which has received massive opposition from nearly every sentient being that uses the internet, has been removed from consideration “until there is wider agreement on a solution,” by its author Lamar Smith.

Remember that PIPA, while it will be opposed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid when it comes to a vote on Tuesday, is still very much a clear and present danger to our internet freedoms. And the fact that SOPA has been shelved for now doesn’t mean a permanent end to its existence.

For more information about how you can contact your representative to express your opposition to PIPA and SOPA, check here.