Stop American Censorship


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The rhetoric is panicky because as we’ve seen so many times, what seems reasonable is so rapidly abused.

If you’re in the US, please take a moment to call your representative and let them know you’re against this.

Former Senator Chris Dodd — now head of the Motion Picture Association of America — says that China censors its Internet, so we can too:

“When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites.”

These are the voices our lawmakers listen to.  If we’re going to win, we need to drown them out before TOMORROW’s committee vote on SOPA.   

What’s even worse, is when Chris Dodd was serving in Congress, he had this to say:

Tell the Chinese government that Google.cn will no longer censor information with Google’s consent. And should the Chinese government not find that acceptable, then Google.cn would shut down its operations. I understand that you’ve already moved all of your search records out of China, to prevent them from being turned over to the Chinese government. But what better way to affirm Google’s commitment to the free flow of information as a human right, than to send this message to a nation with the largest population in the world?

So, Mr. Dodd dances with the girl whose brung him.

More on Mr. Dodd’s mouth and how he’s able to talk out of both sides of it: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111211/23345917036/mpaa-boss-chris-dodd-then-now-concerning-google-censorship-china.shtml

TechDirt has lots of good info on SOPA and why it is evil as well: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=sopa

And just so you know, this shit is happening now.  http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/08225217010/breaking-news-feds-falsely-censor-popular-blog-over-year-deny-all-due-process-hide-all-details.shtml

After you call, you can go back to whacking off.  I promise. :-)

2 thoughts on “Stop American Censorship”

  1. You guys have some brass balls to post this when the industry whose content you piggy-back off of and who you accept advertising dollars has gotten eviscerated from content theft. You seriously think the government would need a copyright-protection law like this to shut down what they would consider politically-problematic websites? Or are you just regurgitating the Chicken Little chickenshit that the billionaires in Silicon Valley who benefit to the hilt by online content theft and stand to lose via stronger copyright protection are spewing out there to the hordes of web-sheep?

    1. Bottom line, I think it’s bad law. I think the law is too broad and too poorly written and too sloppy to implement in its present state. DNS isn’t meant to behave in the ways this law wants.

      I don’t want the government to have the powers it wants to grant itself.

      YouTube is a haven for copyright infringement. So the government can just decide to take it off-line? What about all the NON infringing content? Tough shit? Does a content creator have to police every site they use for distribution to make sure that there’s NO opportunity for copyrighted material to be posted without the copyright owner’s consent, since a single infringement can knock an entire site off line, taking my self-generated content with it?

      Ask the mooo.com folks what it’s like to have your webstore knocked off-line because ONE of the 84,000 users on the site posted infringing material, and the Dept. of Homeland Security (what the fuck are they even doing involved?)

      Ditto the dajayz1.com folks – they’re ASKED to post material by the copyright owners and they lose their site for a year and no one will talk to them about it; records are sealed, dockets are hidden… What the fuck?

      Twitter’s general counsel makes a compelling argument as to why this overbroad: http://www.bricoleur.org/2011/12/overbroad-censorship-users.html

      The way they’ve fucked up the current domain seizures doesn’t fill me with confidence that they have the tools or knowledge to actually do the job correctly — due process anyone? — so why would I want to grant them the power to wield that anyway?

      I am no fan of content theft, and I absolutely agree it has all-but-destroyed the porn industry…. but I don’t think this particular law is the solution.

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