American Censorship Day

“Well, there you go again…”

The US government is pondering granting itself permission to completely and utterly fuck up the internet in the name of stopping piracy.  If we’re not about protecting the children (I’m looking at you, 2257), we’re about protecting content creators using the equivalent of a digital nuke.

Here’s some propaganda from Fight for the Future:

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.”  (emphasis ours)

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. (Hot link ours.)

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.

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For me, it’s not about the money — $47 million is nothing in terms of the national budget — it’s about the absolute corruption of power and the overstepping of bounds.

[vimeo clip_id=”31100268″ title=”1″ byline=”0″ portrait=”1″ height=”” width=”600″]

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

If you’re a Tell Congress not to censor the internet NOW! – http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa

Here’s some stuff to read: