The Death Of The Internet As We Know It May Be At Hand.
I haven’t been around much. I’ve been spending a lot of time on Reddit following the fight against SOPA and PIPA. These bills, if they pass, could kill the internet as we know it.
Yeah, I hear the peanut gallery thinking I’m over-reacting as usual. Like when I called the death of Myspace during the “glitch” days, and was “over-reacting” perhaps? Like I over-reacted to the NDAA’s provisions for the indefinite detention of American citizens? Yeah, I give a shit about stuff like that.
This shit is serious, so please bear with me. If anyone ever gives a damn about anything I freak out about, please do so now.
SOPA and PIPA, if they pass, will enable any site on the internet to be easily censored by corporations and our government. These bills are being aggressively sold to the public as anti-piracy bills. The reality is they are anti-free speech bills. Anyone and everyone can be shut up and shut down under these bills. All it takes is someone (anyone) posting a link to copywritten material on a website for it to get shut down completely.
You like Friendburst? Well, just wait until Facebook has it shut down because someone posts a Youtube video in a blog that contains a copywritten song. What a quick and easy way for the heavy-hitters to remove the competition!
Our bought congress (and probably president) are going to try to push these through as soon as possible unless we put heavy pressure on them right now. These bills have widespread, bipartisan support because our politicians are all bought off by corporations that want to use these bill to powergrab the internet and cheapen it down into some sort of cable television clone where they have total control of all information.
The timing of this is perfect considering the ongoing efforts to black out any serious coverage of OWS or information networking within the movement.
If you want more info on what’s going on to fight these bills, go here and read up on the links listed there. So far, r/SOPA has managed to force several corporations into backing out of their support of these horrible bills. They just bitchslapped GoDaddy into a corner over this and have been hitting other corporations and lawmakers with petitions and boycotts.
Ground is being made in this fight, but we need more people to help put pressure on Washington and it’s ruling corporations. Here’s a list of companies that are pushing in favor of this bill along with their contact info.
Once again, this is serious. Regardless of whatever bigger issues you may feel are out there, we won’t be able to accomplish them if these bills get passed. I beg you all to take this seriously.
If you want to hang up flyers locally to push against these bills, check this out
http://fightcensorship.info/flyer
Type in your zip code and a PDF flyer will be generated for you containing the contact info of your area’s reps. It’s quick and it’s easy.
I do take this very seriously. That we are not hearing about it on Main Stream Media tells us just how urgent this is. The internet is all we have left.
Good to see you here.
Absolutely, and well presented Moose.
Thank you for informing me and providing the links, I appreciate this.
😕 scary news
It would be the end of Joko Videos as we know them….
The Corporations behind this legislation, the Movie Industry, and the Music Industry, just happen to be the ones who distributed and made money off of the File Sharing, and Piracy software in the first place. AND when they distributed it, they encouraged people to use it illegally
I presently have my 2 year old grandson and I have limited time to read all the links. I’ve been news shy as of late and really know very little of this. I am under the impression from what I did read that this is to shut down sites that there only or main purpose is to stream or distribute copyrighted material. You Tube started some time ago deleting videos that had copy written material in them. The movie and music industries are losing quite a bit of money from piracy. I just wonder out loud what people think those industries should do to stop this??
I share Lady Hart’s concern about protecting intellectual property. Some say that SOPA could be reworked to do that, but less invasively to civil liberties.
From http://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/urge-congress-stop-sopa :
“…the ACLU expressed opposition to the bill because it would allow for the takedown of non-infringing content along with infringing content, in violation of the First Amendment.”
At the urging of another FriendBurst blogger, colvin, I telephoned my three Congresspersons a few days ago. I aked them a quick three-for-one:
1. No SOPA.
2. Free Bradley Manning.
3. Scientists say we may have less than five years to halt irreversible global warming – please act.
The legislation is so broadly worded that it could be applied to all Social Networks, since somebody somewhere has at least linked to something illegally uploaded using the software provided by the same Corporations behind this legislation.
I Blog old movies, and music videos. Many of the movies are most certainly Public Domain. Of course, there’s no way to be certain without a copyright lawyer on hand to check out each and every one. I simply trust that they are available on YouTube legally. The same sort of goes with the video clips, which could be considered Fair Use for Educational purposes. There’s no question about whether I’ve been building a Blog Library. That has to be obvious.
This morning I read thar Redit plans on doing a shut down protest in the middle of this month