The New Civil Rights Movement is proud to join major Internet websites tomorrow, January 18, by going dark from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM ET to protest SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, both being debated by Congress. We join websites like Wikipedia and Reddit, The Raw Story and Imgur, and LGBT websites like the Bilerico Project, to say “No!,” the Internet is for everyone and Congress cannot make laws that are inherently dangerous to our civil rights.
We urge you to contact Congress and tell them, “No!” too.
Internet piracy hurts us all. When we see our content appearing in violation of our copyright policy, not only does it hurt us financially, but, quite frankly, it hurts us emotionally. How would you feel if something you labored on for hours was stolen?
So we get that Internet piracy is “bad.” But we also know that SOPA and PIPA are not only the wrong “solutions,” they’re worse.
To be honest, this site, while it doesn’t even come close to paying our rent, thanks to you does generate a small amount of income that we cannot afford to give up, even for one day, but what’s one day’s worth of income compared to being forced to shut down permanently?
SOPA and PIPA literally could shut us down for good — or force us to shut down rather than subject ourselves to the possibility of being sued.
Right now, SOPA and PIPA, if they became law, would allow a malicious “reader” to plant copyrighted content in our comments section, and if we didn’t realize it immediately, the owner of that content could have us shut down almost immediately.
Imagine that — someone writes what looks like an intelligent comment and pertinent to the discussion, only, they didn’t, it’s someone else’s work, and through no fault of our own, we’re the losers.
SOPA and PIPA are like Trojan horses, waiting to be unleashed.
They actually could allow our government to alter search engine results — completely eliminating The New Civil Rights Movement content from, say, Yahoo! or Bing or even Google. SOPA and PIPA would essentially make sites that bring us a tremendous percentage of our traffic — Reddit and Facebook, for instance, possibly illegal.
Please visit AmericanCensorship.org to learn more, and to take action.
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PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.