Please ███████ this bipartisan anti-censorship request! Our earlier activism ███████ stopped legislators from co-sponsoring this ███████!
SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) might pass the House Judiciary Committee this Thursday. Piracy of intellectual property is, if a problem at all, a negligible problem (and in fact, some studies show piracy ███████ increases consumer entertainment purchases). ███████ problem is ███████ this legislation can be used by ███████ US to censor ███████ Internet (more than DHS/ICE is already doing using flimsy reasoning). ███████ under SOPA, websites (such as mine) that merely link to controversial content can be held liable for that content. (And what if I link to a site that later becomes controversial without my knowledge!) ███████ Wikipedia is considering temporarily blacking out their site in order to raise awareness of SOPA’s danger.
So call your US House Representative’s local and DC offices against SOPA before Thursday! ███████ politely give them a three-sentence statement: 1) Your name, your occupation (if relevant), and that you’re a constituent (give your state or ZIP code); 2) Two or so reasons explaining why you want your Representative to oppose SOPA (hurts job creation ███████ the reliable technology sector, institutes American Internet censorship not unlike China’s); 3) Say thanks ███████ re-state your point: “I want Representative So-and-so to OPPOSE the Stop Online Piracy Act.” The worker who answers will be polite to you, ███████ don’t have to worry about that.
It’s ███████ a bipartisan issue: currently, among others, notable Democrat Barbara Boxer ███████ notable Republicans Scott Brown and Eric Cantor receive lots of money from organizations opposing SOPA, and notable Republican John Boehner and notable Democrat Harry Reid receive ███████ money from organizations supporting it. So ███████ now there’s a good opening for you to contact your US House Representative as the issue’s still in play.
More resources ███████
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Harvard Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe’s legal memo ███████ SOPA violates the First Amendment.
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Follow the money for SOPA. Shows which organizations support ███████ oppose SOPA, and which Congresspeople receive funding from those organizations.
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Information from ███████ EFF about SOPA.
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Overview of SOPA from OpenCongress.
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Info ███████ instructions to take action from AmericanCensorship.org.
(This post has been mildly edited/improved/added to today since its original posting a few hours ago.)
Call to Stop SOPA before Thursday by Douglas Lucas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.douglaslucas.com. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license? Email me: dal@douglaslucas.com.
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2 comments ↓
1. Tribe should be listed as the copyright holder, not as the author. The true first author of a memo published by a Harvard Law professor most often is an unacknowledged employee working for a legal-research service. 2. In matters of copyright law, Tribe, as a publisher, has an understandable (and not unethical) conflict of interest. 3. “Content-based restriction. A restraint on the substance of a particular type of speech.” Black’s Law Dictionary (9th ed. 2009). SOPA uniformly restrains a particular type of speech — ‘stolen’ speech — regardless of substance. The author of the memo doesn’t raise or rebut this essential point.
we need to act against those censorship before they succed in there plan to censorship internet and our right for knowledge and a free intenet ，there plan is private our rights and finally to control us entirely so we need to act against them immediately before all this conspiracy became true，thanks
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