The inventor of the World Wide Web has come out against SOPA and PIPA. British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web in 1989, called the legislation a violation of human rights and urged Americans to contact their legislators and express their opposition.

Speaking at the IBM Lotusphere conference in Florida the day after the SOPA Blackout, Berners-Lee said that SOPA and PIPA “have not been put together to respect human rights as is appropriate to a democractic country.”

In 1989 Berners-Lee, who was knighted in 2004 by Queen Elizabeth II, wrote a proposal that suggested the interlinking of various fledgling technologies – including hypertext, the domain name system, and the internet – to create the World Wide Web. The project was accepted by CERN in 1990 and in 1991 the first website, info.cern.ch, was put online. Berners-Lee went on to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which manages the continued development of the Web.