I recently saw this tweet from Notch and thought I should pass it on to my fellow Minecraft players.

notch Markus Persson
Decided. We'll silently take down minecraft.net and mojang.com on the 18th in protest of SOPA.

What does this mean to you? Well, multiplayer relies on minecraft.net to authenticate logins to make sure they're actual paid copies of the game, so there will most likely be no way to play SMP on that day.

Duly noted. Thank you for pointing this out. Now I know how to respond when people ask why it isn't working that day.

Oh noes no (multiplayer) Minecraft for the day, whatever will you guys do?

Tee hee. I never play on Multiplayer! I mean oh no whatever will I do?!

I just got an update on this.

Tomorrow, January 18, we will close down www.minecraft.net, www.mojang.com and www.playcobalt.com in a protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act. Read more about the protest on reddit’s blog, Wikimedia Foundation, WordPress’ blog and Destructoid.

(Minecraft and Cobalt login servers will still be available.)

Source: Mojang blog

So multiplayer functionality will not be affected after all. Just no new players can buy it.

For those curious, here is what minecraft.net leads to during the blackout. I chuckled.

1 attached image