Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Congressional Assault on Free Speech

Today, I was going to make a regular post, but if you live in the English speaking world you may have noticed that a number of sites (e.g., Wikipedia, Google, etc.) have subtle or not so subtle protest pages.  In fact, Wikipedia blackouts all searches and redirects them to a page that looks like the following:


Some of you may have read about the Congressional SOPA or PIPA bills.  I personally believe that this is a direct assault on small-time creators of print or media content (including bloggers like myself).  If you haven't heard how a bill supposedly created to stop online piracy may create some dramatic unintended consequences, I'd encourage you to take a few minutes and watch the following TED presentation by Clay Shirky (professor at New York University) and then take action and contact your Congresspersons (if you live in the US).  Thanks for your consideration in protecting freedom of speech.



4 comments:

Virgil said...

Contacted all my congress people yesterday via Email. Now I want to phone them, since I understand that is more effective.
How are us folks who work for a living going to find the time to straighten out the government, I wonder? Seems like I could rattle off 4 or 5 really obnoxious and really new features of government policies in the US without any trouble...

Unknown said...

And there I thought that America was the land of freedom and liberties... (unlike socialistic money-wasting Europe :-)

Nate Maas said...

Thanks, Virgil. I agree with you. Appreciate the team effort.

Rob, you are correct. Unfortunately, more and more, it seems like America WAS.

VanesaBell said...

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