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dnnyca:
The New York Times did an article today of what the Protect IP Act would do:
“The bills would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. The House version goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright - a sharp change from current law, which protects the service providers from civil liability if they remove the problematic content immediately upon notification.”
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.