The New York Times did an article today of what the Protect IP Act would do:

China already has the largest and most fierce internet censorship program in the world, a system that has been largely criticized by the rest of the world, including the United States Government (Barack and Hilary). Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt stands against the Protect IP Act, Facebook, Mozilla, Yahoo, eBay and more than 130 other CEO’s of internet start-up businesses including Etsy and 4chan founders have written to Congress to not pass this bill. It will severely harm American innovation and leave us culturally crippled. 

YouTube will have thousands of videos taken down immediately, mp3’s and music blogs will shut down by the masses, art blogs and galleries will be forced to have “copyrighted” art taken off, even Tumblr would be forced to have millions of posts removed. The Internet will shrink overnight for American Citizens.

I urge you not to let this happen, please take a moment and tell them no, tell Congress that this is a free country and we will never let that change.

Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet

mattsbrickgallery:

Please stop what you are doing and take 3 seconds and do this.  The internet needs to stay open.

Corporations have way too much power and influence already, why give them more?

Put it all together, guys. At Occupy Wallstreet the other day a bunch of reporters and even a congressman were arrested. They’re trying to block all the livestreams & videos of police brutality. They’re trying to hide all the evidence against them. Not only that, but if this passes, they can hide any evidence against them. The police force is militant. Our government doesn’t even see eye to eye with us and it’s a constant power struggle, like a mom with her kids. We don’t need to be parented by our government. These are the beginnings of a new State in creation. And if we don’t pay attention, if we rely on others to take action for us, it will be like a time machine & everything will regress. 

I think that’s the last straw for me. I’m going to start preparing myself for huge, total catastrophic change in the country I live in. Time to get my read on & get rid of as much evidence of my existence as possible. 

Shit is going to go down. It will.

^^^ 

Stop hearting pictures of cats and read.

Today, Congress holds hearings on the first American Internet censorship system. If the bills pass, and they very well may, sites like Tumblr may be shut down for letting people post what they want.

Visit americancensorishop.org for details, and definitely visit this special tumblr page.

Take action - spread this message, even if you’re not an US citizen. Contact your Representative. Don’t hesitate - your voice counts, make it heard!

I know there are a lot of posts out there about this, but not always a lot of information. These are screen shots from the AVAAZ website, further explaining the rights that everyone stands to lose if SOPA is passed. They have another petition that you can sign. I say call your representatives, sign petitions, do whatever you can. Use the internet to protect the internet, no matter what country you’re from.

Here are some petitions you can sign, all of which will be seen by Congress:

You can also:

Please do this. This is a GLOBAL issue. This will affect every country in the world, and signing a petition will only take a second.

This is not "ridiculous". This is not a fucking joke. This is something near and dear to us, both in the States and, in the future, out of them, so take action!

I Believe In The Internet - The Content Industry Doesn't

I have always believed that the entertainment industry’s effort to stop piracy by asking search engines and ISPs to make it more difficult for their users to find pirate sites was the wrong way to solve the problem, but it could never put my finger on why I felt so strongly about it. After all, the entertainment industry argues that they are only targeting the worst pirates and are only asking for help because those pirates are offshore and out of the reach of U.S. authorities.   At a dinner earlier this week, Joi Ito, the head of the Media Lab at MIT described the Internet as a “belief system” and I suddenly understood. The Internet is not just a series of pipes. It’s core architecture embeds an assumption about human nature. The Internet is designed to empower individuals not control them. It assumes that the if individuals are empowered, they will do the right thing the vast majority of the time. Services like eBay, Craigslist, Etsy and AirBnB are built on the assumption that most people are honest. Other services like Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, Wordpress, and Soundcloud assume people will be generous with their ideas, insights and creations. Wikipedia has proven that people will share their knowledge. Companies like Kickstarter show that people will even be generous with their money. This does not mean that there are not bad people out there. All of these companies spend a lot of time and money to battle spam and fraud. The companies are simply betting that there are many more good people than bad. The architecture of the Internet shares this assumption. It could have been designed to prevent bad behavior. Instead its design empowers good behavior.   The entertainment industry does not share this view of human nature.  I recently suggested to a friend at Viacom that one possible solution to the offshore piracy problem would be to have browsers launch a pop-up with a warning the way they do for phishing sites. Something like THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES HAS DETERMINED THAT THIS SITE HOSTS UNAUTHORIZED COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. DOWNLOADING MATERIAL FROM THIS SITE MAY BE ILLEGAL.  If that warning included a link where the user could find the content and purchase it legally at a fair price, I believe it would make a big dent on piracy.   My friend disagreed. He said that users would just see the warning as confirmation they were in the right place. He cited other examples of moral failing suggesting that he believes that in general people will take advantage of others if given the chance. I think something else is going on. I believe that downloaders are making a moral calculation and coming to the conclusion that the content industry immorally perpetuates an artificial scarcity to maximize their profits at the expense of users and artists. They understand that content is a non-rival good, that unlike an apple, they can consume it without diminishing anyone else’s ability to consume the same thing. They know that the content owner paid nothing to reproduce or distribute the content on the Internet. They also know that the artists who created the original content get a tiny fraction of the revenue. So they are making a moral judgement that the content owners are pricing their product to extract unjustifiable profits and they feel morally justified taking the content they find out there on the web.   Whether you agree with me that the vast majority of people are good or with my friend that given a chance many people will steal is not really important. What is important is that PIPA, and SOPA, the legislation the content industry is currently pushing through Congress, will not allow me to architect a service and build a relationship with consumers that reflects my core beliefs about human nature.  If I am a search engine and I remove sites from my index, I am essentially lying to my users. If I am a social media site and I remove links my users have posted to sites that some authority has deemed illegal, I am breaking a promise. I am sympathetic to the content industries struggles with piracy, but my belief system tells me the answer is to capitalize on the great strengths of the Internet to create a healthy and profitable relationship with their users not to sue them. No matter how strongly I believe that, however, I do not think I have the right to tell them how to run their business. Apparently, they do not feel the same way about our businesses. The current legislation in Congress does not just create an administrative burden, it requires service providers who have built wonderful businesses on a deep conviction about human nature to change their relationship with their users in a way that subverts their core values. Unfortunately, this legislation may pass. The content Industry has invested heavily to get it through. Legislators need to hear from every entrepreneur and every user who understands that the Internet is more than a set of pipes. They need to hear that innovation and economic development comes from empowering users not constraining them. You can learn more here. You can make your voice heard by participating in American Censorship Day. Please make yourself heard.

Tumblr just put up this site warning people about the dangers of PROTECT-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Read up, kids. This is important.

Your morning homework: Read this letter from AOL, eBay, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo!, & Zynga. Then visit Tumblr’s page and take action.

Some more links which might be useful:

And then Thor showed up and replaced the Senate with Asgard.

If we can’t protect the Internet, you can be damn sure we’ll avenge it.

^

I love everyone in this bar. Tumblr will prevail.

YES! OUR PRESIDENT FOR THE WIN. YET AGAIN.

good president, best friend

#Obama doesn’t wanna lose his blog

He is like ” I just joined TUMBLR and you want to take that away from me, HELL NO!” 

^^^^

YAYBAMA

Tumblr Savior should be changed to Obama.

Obama has already said he will uphold net neutrality, meaning SOPA will be vetoed if it makes it to his desk

Tumblr and Youtube could be shut down by the end of 2011

Welp.

I, for one, find Tumblr one of the more reliable sources of information and one of the most up to date. We knew about the content of Obama’s impromptu surprise announcement before he announced it himself, just to name an example. The same difference applies to Youtube, so when I see things like this:

Sssssooooo…the government is enforcing copyright. Without proof or hearing they uproot a UK resident and SHIP HIM OVER to be persecuted in the US. WITHOUT PROOF.

Now we have The IP Act that is on the fast track of becoming a law.

An except that summarizes what this does: “The PROTECT IP Act would allow copyright owners – movie studios and other content providers – simply to accuse a website of infringement, which could lead to that site being shut down by court order and entire links to the site being wiped clean from the Internet.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if you even pass a disagreeable fart, a big angry fist will punch you in the butthole and seal said butthole forever.

WHERE’S OUR SHIT GONNA GO?

Before:

After:

So the title of this, while an exaggeration of something that hasn’t happened, is a very real possibility and it’s so close to happening.

SIGN THIS SHIT

 SIGN THIS SHIT

SIGN THIS SHIT

SIGN THIS SHIT

SIGN THIS SHIT

SIGN THIS SHIT

SIGN THIS SHIT

SIGN THIS SHIT

SIGN THIS SHIT

SIGN THIS SHIT

Don’t just reblog this and feel like you helped the world because you’re half-assing it. Sign it. Reblog it. Sign it and reblog it.

I signed it again.

And I’m reblogging it again.

I respect your intent to calm, but freaking out is necessary no matter WHEN this bill has the possibility of becoming law.

Okay, okay, calm down, my babies.  Despite its apparent inefficiency, the U.S. government was actually intended to be slow and arduous in its law-changing.  

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I can gather, these are the facts:

Here’s what people don’t seem to be taking into account.  Again, correct me if I’m wrong.

Assuming that I am not missing some huge part of this debate, please don’t freak out.  The internet is not exploding tomorrow.  ♥

It matters not. It. does. not. matter. We need to kill this bill as soon as possible, if not sooner. Have you not seen the potentialities? Have you not noticed the things that might be killed off -- some of the best sites on the Internet -- if this does, eventually, make it into the law books? Just because it's not going to destroy everything tomorrow does not mean it's not time to act.

If SOPA passes, the following sites could be blocked for US users:

Sign the damn petition

If you're on Tumblr, if you ever post anything that isn't exclusively yours on Tumblr, YOU ARE ALREADY AT RISK IF THIS BECOMES LAW

STOP SOPA, SAVE THE INTERNET

wilwheaton:

nachobragers: