https://americancensorship.org/
I’m Canadian, yet can easily see that this is bullshit. You guys (Read: Americans.) should hope this doesn’t pass. Feel free to email your congress or whatever, if that does anything. *shrug* (Cue Copypasta!)
In any case, this is a bill being pushed by corporations and associations in the entertainment industry (things like the RIAA, MPAA, ESA, companies like Viacom, etc.), without any say or vote from people in the technology industry. This is about money. These big corporations can only see that *some* people pirate things, and feel those are lost sales. I’m of the opinion that they still get positive word of mouth from those (which, in advertising, is known as the best kind of advertisement), and that a super-majority of those people would not have bought that particular movie/show/game anyhow. This is all not to mention the fact that they want us to repeatedly buy the same thing to store it on our computer, or transfer it to another medium. But to them, that is correct, and they can’t stand people going around their price-gouging system.
Besides all that though, this law is largely unconstitutional. It would be bypassing any right to trial or due-process. For instance, some user could come on these forums, and post a thread with a link to some copyrighted content. Some representative of the entertainment industry could find a link on Google or some other site pointing to the thread. Staff would remove this thread once they see it, but maybe we didn’t get to it yet, or maybe it’s gone and the representative thinks it’s license to believe that there might be more links on this website. There’s no due process. So, all of a sudden, this site is no longer pointed to my server, it’s stolen from me and disabled at a DNS level. This is something that was previously reserved for American-hosted sites that posed threats to National Security. And that’s it. There’d be jack I could do about it, and I’d receive a hefty fine in the mail, a felony on my record, and a possibility of five years in jail in one of our lovely correctional institutions. I’m no criminal, but, put in me in one of those for five years, and I’ll emerge one, almost undoubtedly. And I’d probably get raped. And I’d probably get killed trying to kill my raper for raping me.
Anyhow, this whole thing vastly oversteps everything that is remotely fair, or constitutional, as well as overstepping the freedoms and neutrality of the internet.
Feel free to post this on any websites you guys might own or frequent- the absolute best thing you can do is get the word out. If there’s a large public outcry, maybe that will make our congressional representatives do the right thing for once. Maybe freedom can win over money.
/Copypasta
tl;dr – The U.S. of A’s money grubbin’ fat cats are trying to put a stranglehold on the Internet, and your rights to free speech. Bitch slapping creativity in the face along the way.
EDIT: And yeah I know, it’s been awhile. But this was enough to get me to post. Maybe I’ll start doing stuff with this site again.
