Blacklist Bill For US

[Bardon]

IT'S ALIVE!

But, first of all: GREAT WORK. The House Blacklist Bill was introduced as expected yesterday -- but with only a handful of sponsors.

There's little doubt that this is because of the ruckus we've all raised together -- especially the 50,000+ emails we sent in this week asking our lawmakers to refuse to sponsor the bill.

Now that it's been introduced, will you ask your lawmakers to VOTE AGAINST the House version of the Blacklist Bill?

The bad news: The bill is a nightmare.

The rumors were true. The new Blacklist Bill could effectively destroy YouTube, Twitter, and other sites that rely on user-generated content by making the sites' owners legally responsible for content their users post.

It could shut down music storage lockers and other cloud-based products.

And it also includes provisions that would make it a felony to stream unlicensed content -- including cover band performances, karaoke videos, video game play-throughs, and more.

Will you click here to ask your Congressmember to oppose this legislation?

It's a grab-bag of Halloween goodies for a handful of big corporations -- but for us it's Frankenstein's monster, cobbled together from half-born bills, set to suffocate free speech and innovation and terrorize consumers and Internet users.

Please help send the House version of PROTECT IP to its grave. Click here.

Thanks, yet again.

The Demand Progress team.

PS: As you know, the more people we bring to the table, the more likely Congress is to pay attention. Will you ask your friends to join the cause?

Never thought it'd actually happen..... O_o

If it really passes then things could get real rough on the internet. Though as I've said before and as obvious as it may already seem, there is no freaking way this bill is gonna stay without a fight and one hell of a fight too!

[Monad-Gnostis]

O_0 oh crap! This isnt happening! Ive got way too much stuff online.

[† Mute point]

It won't pass, just like the last one didn't pass, or the one before that. The government has tried, and failed to control the internet. They're going to keep trying, and failing.

[Dan Den]

I remember reading about this earlier today, I was going to post it but guess you beat me to it.

Oh well on to the topic, I can't say it bothers me allot but yeah I do sometime go to YouTube to watch a few videos and sometimes they have these tracks in them and this could really fuck up allot of those sites such as YouTube. But I can't say I didn't see this coming I mean it was only a matter of time before this happened, oh well I guess that's how the internet cookie crumbles.

*EDIT, what the fuck, I though this was just for those guys singing to copy righted music but alos video game walk through, so it's only a matter of time before YouTube and such other sites will have to close down due to the luck of fan made material. YouTube is just like Facebook, without users it will cease to exist and this is most definitely going to happen if this bill goes through.

[lemmingllama]

Its possible that it could pass, if it would be most beneficial for the government. It is just that they would lose too many votes if they put this bill into motion

[failedhornet]

Whom would lose who's vote exactly?

I can't imagine this bill, assuming it does pass into law, will affect my life very much. The internet has almost taken on a life of its own, and like that one guy on Jurassic Park said "uh uh uh life finds a way". There will be ways around this new bullshit.

[Bluenoser]

It won't pass, just like the last one didn't pass, or the one before that. The government has tried, and failed to control the internet. They're going to keep trying, and failing.

All it takes though is one time to succeed. This is why the fight CANNNOT be lessened against it, because the freedom of the internet is the average person's single biggest weapon against the power of the wealthy and/or entrenched interests in the power structures of our respective societies. When they are able to truly choke off that freedom of information exchange they choke off the biggest threat to their own control over all of us. Sounds conspiracy theory to some? Try reading the Toffler's books Future Shock (1970), The Third Wave(1980), and Power Shift(1990) and see the trends they were seeing then and compare them to what happened and notice just how close they were to accurately predicting the general patterns dealing with the impacts of the information age as it developed on the power structures of the various "free" Western societies.

The Toffler's are by no means a sole source for my views, but I do find them to be the most accessible for those that are not into techno/baffle speak but plain language use while retaining the core meaning within their language use. I am old enough that I was just shy of starting elementary school when the first book came out, had read it by the time the second book came out and bought the first edition of the third book as soon as it published because of how impressed I was by the first two books. Taken together they comprise one of the better works of futurist conceptualization I have ever encountered in the non-fiction world. We are living in the period where the old power structures are being forced to come more and more out of the shadows to prevent the new information age power structures from surplanting them, because they cannot simply co-opt the new ones because the inherent basis of how the new patterns work are inherently antithetical in many core respects to the old, so they are forced to surpress them This fight over copyright and information/media control in the online world is a major front in this war, and it is *VITAL* that it not be lost!!!

We are nearing then end of the great powershift that was first being noticed in Future Shock 40 years ago, the next decade or two will help shape the patterns of our societies for a long time to come. The free exchange of media and ideas sparks more and more without easy controls (which has its own dangers to it, all tools are inherently two or more sided, this also cannot be forgotten IMHO), which creates new possibilities for revenue generation and wealth creation, and makes the old expression about knowledge being power truly take on new reality, which is what the old guard power structure holders are so terrified of. Which is why we keep seeing bills like this in the US Congress, since the US is the only nation on Earth with as strong a legal protection on free speech/exchange of information (which is also why it was able to birth the modern internet out of the cold war military Darpanet) as it has which is why what happens there in this arena ripples out to the rest of the "free" world in this arena.

This is not simply corporate greed involved in this, this is something more fundamental than that, and it is important for people to understand that, especially younger people and 20something adults, forgive me but you are too young to remember just how stifled and controlled our worlds were even back in the days of the big three TV networks. The creation of the cable universe in the 80s followed by the GUI driven World Wide Web in the 90s and then the convergence effects of the past decade have so fundamentally changed the way we live and our perceptions of it that for those born and raised before it and those born and raised after it started truly have very different perspectives, and those that were raised as power holders in the old structures see the new power generators as not only uncontrollable by them but also as corrosive to what power they continue to hold, which is why they become more and more desperate and more and more out in the open in terms of how blatant they are in their attempts to restrain the new and continue their own dominant position in the various human power structures in our societies. This is a global phenomena, it may be more advanced in certain respects in the first world countries but it is spilling into the second and third worlds as well, indeed many third world nations may well jump the second world pattern altogether (aka they will not need to do the intensive industrialization that typically is a core aspect of becoming a second world nation/power). It is also part of what is driving the various movements of discontent throught the world including within our own societies.

Sorry, hadn't meant to go into this in quite such detail, but I am in full earnest with all of this though, we truly live in interesting and historic times that come rarely in human history, these types of powershifts happen rarely and have in the past take multiple lifetimes from beginning to well defined end of the transitions, this one is happening in an average western person's human lifespan, and it is the speed of it as much as anything that is making it as wild a ride as it has been, let alone where it is going as we oh so swiftly reach the climax point. Watching and trying to understand this has been for me personally the single most important aspect of my own life, ever since I first started becoming dimly aware of this in my late childhood and started asking questions and learning all I could (I was also blessed ot have unusually high grade information sources in various of the important fields available to me growing up which was a major edge in both perceiving this as well as being able to start to perceive the wider patterns especially from a young age, well that combined with a natural bent in that direction too, seriously a really lucky convergence) from then onwards. I always loved history, and being privileged enough to live during such an amazing period of history and being able to follow it AS IT HAPPENS (unlike those pre-information age tech) has given my life a lot of meaning it would otherwise have lacked.

[Dan Den]

Well there has been a new update for all those following this.

Irony Alert: The House is holding hearings on sweeping Internet censorship legislation this week -- and it's censoring the opposition! The bill is backed by Hollywood, Big Pharma, and the Chamber of Commerce, and all of them are going to get to testify at the hearing.

But the bill's opponents -- tech companies, free speech and human rights activists, and hundreds of thousands of Internet users -- won't have a voice.

Will you click here to demand that opponents of the Blacklist Bill be allowed to testify -- it'll just take a second.

As if you need a reminder: This is the most offensive Internet legislation we've seen in years.

It will give the government and corporations new powers to block Americans' access to sites that are accused of copyright infringement, force sites like YouTube to go to new lengths to police users' contributions, and put people in prison for streaming certain content online.

The bill will wreck much of what's great about the Internet, and this sham of a hearing represents everything that's broken about our political system.

Will you click here to demand that opponents of the Blacklist Bill be allowed to testify this week?

And we keep pressing forward,

-The Demand Progress team