Sound scary?
It’s about to happen in the U.S. Actually, it already does, given that copyright enforcement is inherently censorship-based (something many legislators are curiously unable to say aloud). But it’s about to get much worse: the SOPA / E-PARASITE and PROTECT-IP bills currently pending in the U.S. Congress would, among other things, make it easy for private sector monopolists to cut sites off from the Internet without even proving that illegal copying has taken place. Join us and many others who are censoring their logos today to oppose these laws that would place the United States on a collision course with Internet freedom.
(2020-12-14 Update: The petition site is no longer live, but you might want to learn about the more recent EARN-IT act, which is just as bad only in more ways.)
You’ll be in good company: Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Mozilla, Demand Progress, Fight For the Future, the Participatory Politics Foundation, Creative Commons, Wikimedia, and many more organizations (including us) have all stated their unequivocal opposition to these laws. Even for-profit companies are putting their names on the line, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, and AOL.
Giving monopolists control over the Internet’s address book is a terrible idea. Apparently some elected officials in the U.S. are under the misimpression that they were elected by the copyright industry, not by human constituents. Let’s correct that before it’s too late.
Want to learn more? Read our previous article about it, or click on the infographic below:
its not over with these bills – this is just the beginning. They will be reshaping these and reshaping these until they squeek one by the umpire! thats why we have to PAY ATTENTION and stand together. I am a RN / Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner and in California we just won a huge legislation (AB 1136 – the safe patient handling bill) by standing together, striking together and acting as one unified body of organized protesters – it was amazing, and we need exactly this type of organization to stop this internet censorship. Because the greatest invention to date could become the most oppressive invention over night with one bil eing enough to create momentum… thank you for writing this and stay aware!
– SaraRN