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SOPA has become toxic Donny Shaw, Fight for the Future info@fightforthefuture.org via bounce.bluestatedigital.com 7:23 PM (3 hours ago) to me ... Peter Burgess Now that Congress has had time to process last week's internet blackout, a consensus has emerged: SOPA and PIPA are toxic for politicians, and going anywhere near them could cost them their re-election. Freedom is winning. Together, we've done something amazing-- never have so many people stood up to defend a free and open internet. Here's a San Francisco Chronicle article about how it all came together: The Largest Online Protest in History Started Here. And here's Carl Franzen at Talking Points Memo: 'Behind the scenes, Hill staffers from both sides of the aisle confirmed to TPM that the entire piracy debate had become so 'toxic' that virtually no lawmakers were likely to be ready to re-engage it anytime soon.'Experienced Congress-watchers are telling us they've never seen anything like this. Internet users, tech companies, and non-profits joined together to defend fundamental rights on the internet. To a lot of elites in Congress and the corporate world, the internet is just something that lazy teenagers use to spam people with pictures of photoshopped unicorns. The blackout showed that the peer-to-peer internet is about empowerment, and that when we work together we can defeat the corrupt politics of Washington D.C. The New York Times and Talking Points Memo have both published good articles on how the web blackout was organized. For months, four senators were the only force blocking passage of PIPA/SOPA. They even promised to filibuster the bill back when most politicians were against them. We need to make sure we support and vote for leaders like them who are willing to going to go out on a limb and oppose SOPA before it was popular to do so. It's great that we pressured all those other shlubs into opposing web censorship, but these guys deserve the real cred and our support. What's next? The Fight is not over, already new threats to web freedom are starting to emerge (particularly in Europe) and we're getting ready. Stay tuned, and for more updates, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Thank you again for standing up for a free and open internet! - Donny and Fight for the Future The Largest Online Protest In History Started Here IMAGE Yesterday, you couldn't access Wikipedia and thousands of other sites because the sites were protesting two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect-IP Act (PIPA). Like the Occupy Movement, this movement started from somewhere. The group behind the largest online protest in history is Fight for the Future, which began in October. Tiffiniy Cheng, a co-founder of Fight for the Future said, 'we began with a first day of action on November 16, 2011. We've been working with groups since then to take action before the last vote in the Senate on their version of the bills.' The vote on PIPA is going to happen next week on January 24. Cheng and her team are in their thirties. Some of them went to high school together. They are open source advocates, DJs, writers, and video producers. When the team of five made a video to show what SOPA and PIPA would do, it got 2 million views. Cheng was happy it went viral. 'We have built tools and a ground work for organizing protests and opposition to SOPA and PIPA,' Cheng said, pointing me to the timeline of events. It began on November 16, when Cheng and her team helped organize American Censorship Day. More than 5,000 sites, including Reddit, participated in having their front page taken over. The non-profit got over a million emails that day. And 80,000 calls were made to government officials. 'We saw that SOPA and PIPA was moving ahead. We were seen as the minority. Since November 16, the topic of SOPA and PIPA has been growing steadily. This stuff has been spread. Internet users have been building and building to this very moment,' Cheng said of the online protest. Cheng said it's something they've been discussing for a while, after Wikipedia started the conversation around a possible strike in December. After Reddit announced that they'd do it, momentum has been steady ever since, Cheng said. Like many others in tech, Cheng feels that the bill would be giving corporations too much power because they already have a way of taking down infringing links. The online protests are a way of fighting to protect our right to free speech. 'Sharing and talking about content and art are valuable to our everyday lives,' she said. And if you've tried to access Wikipedia during the blackout, you'll get a sense of what censorship feels like. Complete and utter darkness. |
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Thursday, January 19, 2012 |
| The text being discussed is available at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/01/19/businessinsiderlargest-protest-in-h.DTL |