You may have seen a few things around today telling you that you should help stop censorship and that there's a law in congress that might pass, and if you heard blah blah blah, let me just tell you now that it's absolutely worth your time if you believe that you should be able to post freely on sites like Google, Tumblr and Facebook.
Go to americancensorship.org to get the facts and send a letter to your representative. Hell, I did it, and my representative doesn't even get to vote (related: DC VOTING RIGHTS NOW!).
Is there a possibility that the bleak outlook that internet companies are putting forward where content is shut down at a whim possibly huge overstatement? Yeah, it's a possibility. But at the very least, I'm not willing to take the risk of a world where ISPs and copyright owners are dictating the content of the internet.
That said...as many times as I've been on the side of illegal downloader (or even provider) of copyrighted material, I've also been the person having to get people to take down copyrighted material posted illegally. And while it doesn't anger me at all that people have posted this stuff (the vast majority of the time, it's done out of simple sharing, ignorant to laws and not in spite of them), it's shocking how difficult it is to get sites like Scribd to remove obviously copyrighted works. To post it illegally, you upload it. To get it taken down legally, you have to provide a list of the works and provide an email with official legal language AND send a copy via snail mail. It's much more difficult to protect your works than it is to provide copyrighted works to millions.
A lot has changed in the last few years. For example, record labels very rarely send takedown notices anymore, and in fact, find who has posted their work and offer more mp3s from their label's roster. And so I would much rather see a world where owners of copyrighted materials offer their works in ways that are convenient to ways that benefit everyone rather than having laws that throw out a ton of great content with the effort to overprotect copyrights.
Go to americancensorship.org to get the facts and send a letter to your representative. Hell, I did it, and my representative doesn't even get to vote (related: DC VOTING RIGHTS NOW!).
Is there a possibility that the bleak outlook that internet companies are putting forward where content is shut down at a whim possibly huge overstatement? Yeah, it's a possibility. But at the very least, I'm not willing to take the risk of a world where ISPs and copyright owners are dictating the content of the internet.
That said...as many times as I've been on the side of illegal downloader (or even provider) of copyrighted material, I've also been the person having to get people to take down copyrighted material posted illegally. And while it doesn't anger me at all that people have posted this stuff (the vast majority of the time, it's done out of simple sharing, ignorant to laws and not in spite of them), it's shocking how difficult it is to get sites like Scribd to remove obviously copyrighted works. To post it illegally, you upload it. To get it taken down legally, you have to provide a list of the works and provide an email with official legal language AND send a copy via snail mail. It's much more difficult to protect your works than it is to provide copyrighted works to millions.
A lot has changed in the last few years. For example, record labels very rarely send takedown notices anymore, and in fact, find who has posted their work and offer more mp3s from their label's roster. And so I would much rather see a world where owners of copyrighted materials offer their works in ways that are convenient to ways that benefit everyone rather than having laws that throw out a ton of great content with the effort to overprotect copyrights.
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