Month: January 2012

Politicians shouldn’t be allowed to legislate that which they do not understand. I’m all for copyright protection, but SOPA is too far-reaching. In a nutshell, big companies will be able to censor anything they feel violates their copyright.

[vimeo width=”100%” height=”400″]http://vimeo.com/31100268[/vimeo]

Tell Congress not to censor the internet NOW! – fightforthefuture.org/pipa

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill would cost us $47 million tax dollars a year — that’s for a fix that won’t work, disrupts the internet, stifles innovation, shuts out diverse voices, and censors the internet. This bill is bad for creativity and does not protect your rights.

This petition on We the People: Your Voice in Our Government, nearly 50,000 people have signed a petition asking our President to VETO the SOPA bill and any other future bills that threaten to diminish the free flow of information. People that work on the web have probably been more vocal about this issue than most, but this will impact anyone who uses the web in the United States should it pass.