Stop Congress from Censoring the Net!

Thanks to you SOPA and PIPA have been put on hold. We fully expect parts of these bills will appear in the future. But for now, we have won a great victory!

Why We Oppose the Bills Call Congress

Congress is considering several bills that would censor the Internet and emulate China by creating a Great Firewall of the US. We cannot allow this to happen!

Why we oppose censoring the Internet

Our Information Packet for Senators Regarding PIPA and CFSA
is available.  We hope you will find it a useful reference
when considering the implications of these harmful bills.

If passed, these laws would create a variety of ways for corporations and the US government to censor the Internet. The Senate’s PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) and the House’s Stop On-line Piracy Act (SOPA) would:

make simply linking to an infringing website a crime;
allow the US to blacklist an infringing website without due process, by forcing third-parties to censor the website or stop doing business with the website;
extend most of these tools the US has to private copyright holders;
not penalize a private copyright holder if they blacklist a site in error;
not penalize a payment provider if they ignore the counterclaim of a blacklisted website;
additionally the bill’s definition of what is infringing is very loose and will be abused.

Also, SOPA goes farther than the PROTECT-IP bill and would also:

criminalize streaming of copyrighted material (potentially a 2-5 year jail sentence), even if it was a kid singing a song on Youtube;
criminalize tools that could be used to circumvent SOPA including VPNs and the TOR network;
decrease the security of the domain name system every computer uses to look up host names.

This video by Fight for the Future quickly shows the problems with these bills:

We know we can win since a majority of Americans oppose the measures that SOPA would impose to prop up the failed business models of the large media corporations. Thankfully the computer industry and even the major media are waking up to how these bills would harm free speech. But we cannot rely on them to stop these bills!

Call your Senators and Representatives!

1. Call both Massachusetts Senators and urge them to join Oregon Senator Wyden’s filibuster of PIPA:

Scott Brown
(202) 224-4543
http://scottbrown.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/emailscottbrown

John Kerry
(202) 224-2742
http://kerry.senate.gov/contact/

2. Call your Representatives at the numbers listed below and urge them to oppose SOPA: