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PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
<<strong>NO TO DARKNESS! Protect the internet! OPOSSE SOPA! On January we are 18 joining hundreds of sites around the Internet to oppose SOPA and PIPA! but I decided not GOING DARK but using knowledge about the insanity of the copyright laws and what is at stake. I selected important references that are relevant to understand the complexity of the changes and the impact of the legislation. USA legislation is bending under the pressure of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits with absurd medieval repressive tactics not even caring about the implications for freedom and the cultural impact of the new internet and open culture and its importance for a more democratic ways of knowledge distribution. Information need to FREE!!! These laws pretend to create a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world. Oppose it! dance-tech.net and dance-tech.tv and their platforms would not be able to exist in this SOPA world. The open internet and its huge cultural impact on innovation and change would be doomed. We will be back to a cable TV and the hegemony of a centralized information and knowledge sharing would be limited to just talking about your favorite shows…and celbrity

From Cory Doctorow: "I don't think that any amount of "piracy" justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the consequences of one's actions. Big Content haven't just declared war on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the "fun" Internet: they've declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors, every abused kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life is worth living despite the torment she's experiencing, every grassroots political campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place -- as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings." read whole article: http://boingboing.net/2012/01/14/boing-boing-will-go-dark-on-ja.html

A big hurrah to you!!!!! We’ve won for now -- SOPA and PIPA were dropped by Congress today -- the votes we’ve been scrambling to mobilize against have been cancelled.

The largest online protest in history has fundamentally changed the game.  You were heard.

On January 18th, 13 million of us took the time to tell Congress to protect free speech rights on the internet. Hundreds of millions, maybe a billion, people all around the world saw what we did on Wednesday.  See the amazing numbers here and tell everyone what you did.

This was unprecedented. Your activism may have changed the way people fight for the public interest and basic rights forever.

The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled.  “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA Chairman and former Senator Chris Dodd told the New York Times. ‘[PIPA and SOPA were] considered by many to be a slam dunk.’”

“'This is altogether a new effect,' Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing 'an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically' in the last four decades, he added."  

Tweet with us, shout on the internet with us, let's celebrate: Round of applause to the 13 million people who stood up  - #PIPA and #SOPA are tabled 4 now. #13millionapplause

P.S.  China's internet censorship system reminds us why the fight for democratic principles is so important:

In the New Yorker:  "Fittingly, perhaps, the discussion has unfolded on Weibo, the Twitter-like micro-blogging site that has a team of censors on staff to trim posts with sensitive political content. That is the arrangement that opponents of the bill have suggested would be required of American sites if they are compelled to police their users’ content for copyright violations. On Weibo, joking about SOPA’s similarities to Chinese censorship was sensitive enough that some posts on the subject were almost certainly deleted (though it can be hard to know).
...
After Chinese Web users got over the strangeness of hearing Americans debate the merits of screening the Web for objectionable content, they marvelled at the American response. Commentator Liu Qingyan wrote:

‘We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics.’"

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(press release is here: https://fightfortheftr.wordpress.com/press-releases/)