So just after the largest internet protest in history, the US government gives us all the middle finger and takes down MegaUpload. This is what SOPA/PIPA will do. We MUST KILL BOTH BILLS NOW! Please read the following from Demand Progress. Also SPREAD THE WORD ON ALL SOCIAL MEDIA SITES!
Yes, we know — another email. But this news is urgent UNBELIEVABLE:
One day after history’s largest online protest, the U.S. Government nonchalantly responds with the middle finger. The Wall Street Journal reports:
The FBI shut down Thursday one of the world’s most popular file-sharing websites, MegaUpload.com, and announced the arrest of four of the people behind it in a global crackdown against the suspected online pirates.
Please click here to tell your lawmakers to cut it out: No SOPA, no PIPA, no more website seizures.
Here — check it out: If SOPA and PIPA pass it’ll just broaden the government’s power to do things like this: MegaUpload.com. (And make it illegal for us to link to sites that are seized — like we just did in the last sentence.)
As MegaUpload’s website notes — er… noted:
The fact is that the vast majority of mega’s Internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue.
Thanks,
Demand Progress
The Blackout is over and I must say, it was extremly effective. SOPA/PIPA is losing support left and right. I’ll have a full article up explaining what a success this was soon, but for now, here’s a message from Fight For The Future. First though, on behalf of internet users around the globe, I’d like to say thanks for Demand Progress, Sopastrike.com, Fight For The Future, AGRS Media LLC, Amazon.com, Google, Wikipedia, and the countless other sites that went dark to show support for a free internet.
Today was nuts, right?
Google launched a petition. Wikipedia voted to shut itself off. Senators’ websites went down just from the sheer surge of voters trying to write them. NYC and SF geeks had protests that packed city blocks.
You made history today: nothing like this has ever happened before. Tech companies and users teamed up. Tens of millions of people who make the internet what it is joined together to defend their freedoms. The free network defended itself. Whatever you call it, the bottom line is clear: from today forward, it will be much harder to mess up the internet.
The really crazy part? We might even win.
Approaching Monday’s crucial Senate vote there are now 35 Senators publicly opposing PIPA. Last week there were 5. And it just takes just 41 solid “no” votes to permanently stall PIPA (and SOPA) in the Senate. What seemed like miles away a few weeks ago is now within reach.
But don’t trust predictions. The forces behind SOPA & PIPA (mostly movie companies) can make small changes to these bills until they know they have the votes to pass. Members of Congress know SOPA & PIPA are unpopular, but they don’t understand why–so they’re easily duped by superficial changes. The Senate returns next week, and the next few days are critical. Here are two things to think about:
1. Plan on calling your Senator every day next week. Pick up the phone each morning and call your Senators’ offices, until they vote “no” on cloture. If your site participated today, consider running a “Call the Senate” link all next week.
2. Tomorrow, drop in at your Senators’ district offices. We don’t have a cool map widget to show you the offices nearest you (we’re too exhausted! any takers?). So do it the old fashioned way: use Google, or the phonebook to find the address, and just walk in, say you oppose PIPA, and urge the Senator to vote “no” on cloture. These drop-in visits make our spectacular online protests more tangible and credible.
That’s it for now. Be proud and stay on it!
–Holmes, Tiffiniy, and the whole Fight for the Future team.
___
P.S. Huge credit goes to participants in the 11/16 American Censorship Day protest: Mozilla, 4chan, BoingBoing, Tumblr, TGWTG, and thousands of others. That’s what got this ball rolling! Reddit, both the community and the team behind it, you’re amazing. And of course, thanks to the Wikimedians whose patient and inexorable pursuit of the right answer brought them to take world-changing action. Thanks to David S, David K, Cory D, and E Stark for bold action at critical times.
P.P.S. If you haven’t already, show this video to as many people as you can. It works! http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/
Wikipedia
Minecraft.net
WordPress
AGRStech.com | AGRS Media LLC | AFPFS
We are joining the thousands of sites going dark to protest SOPA/PIPA, but we wanted to share one last letter from Fight for the Future.
Tomorrow, January 18th, 2012, will be the largest internet protest in history. Thousands of sites across the internet, including some of the biggest in the world, will be blacking out and directing people to contact Congress to kill the web censorship bill, SOPA and PIPA. We want to get you involved.
Join us on the historic day by blacking out your site. Copy the code below and paste it into the header of your theme (WordPress users: use the SOPA Strike plugin) to black your site out in protest of SOPA/PIPA. It will activate automatically on Jan. 18th, displaying this page and directing visitors to contact Congress, and will deactivate at the end of the day.
script type=”text/javascript”>// var a=new Date,b=a.getHours()+a.getTimezoneOffset()/60;if(18==a.getDate()&&0==a.getMonth()&&2012==a.getFullYear()&&13<=b&&24>=b)window.location=”http://sopastrike.com/strike”;
// ]]>In just 7 days, the Senate will vote on forever altering the free and open internet by instituting a new regime of extra-judicial, corporate-led website takedowns. This is a fundamental fight about who has power in society — the people with the means to communicate freely or the governments and corporations that feel threatened.
For the full state of play on the censorship bills, take a look at this infographic we’ve put together. Click here. The clock is ticking, and we’re still 35 senators short of the number we need to kill the bill.
If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, please use these links to spread the word about the protest:
Even though GoDaddy claims to have dropped support for SOPA, we don’t trust them and neither should you. We pledge to not do business with anyone that supports or supported SOPA or censorship. Here’s the letter from AmericanCensorship.org
Happy Holidays — we have some great news to share.
We’ve just won two huge battles in the fight against Internet censorship — everything you are doing is working! First off, the House of Representatives failed to move SOPA out of committee! Why? Because their offices got swamped with phone calls and overwhelmed by the snowballing opposition. Thank you for helping make that happen.
Second, in response to the boycott of GoDaddy, the web hosting company just made a public announcement that it’s dropping its support of SOPA. Amazing what you have made happen.
Please join us in holding GoDaddy accountable, until they drop any and all efforts to support not just SOPA, but also its Senate cousin, PIPA. The boycott already worked to get GoDaddy to change their position on SOPA, now we urgently need to hear from GoDaddy about PIPA too.
So what’s next?
The PIPA bill is still alive and strong in the Senate, and could be voted on in January. Like SOPA, it threatens free speech, innovation, and the basic structure of the Internet.
Thank you for all that you do — it is working!
Tiffiniy & Phil
Fight for the Future
The following is from AGRS Media LLC:
Due to GoDaddy’s support of SOPA and PIPA, AGRS Media LLC will no longer be doing business with the company. As such, we are in the process of transferring all AGRS Media LLC owned domains to a new registrar. Our new registrar is Namecheap, who has a clear anti-SOPA/PIPA stance. AGRS Media LLC strongly opposes SOPA/PIPA and all censorship bill’s. As such, we will NOT conduct business with ANY company that supports SOPA/PIPA/Censorship in general. Our sites may become unavailble during the transfer process. Please follow and watch @AGRStech to stay up to date on the transfer.
Thank you.
~Zephaniah Washington
CEO/Founder – AGRS Media LLC.
News from Fight for the Future. We are out of time. If we don’t stop this bill now, we might not be able to stop it at all. If it passes we urge you to protest in the streets. This is America “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.” This phrase will be put to test in a few days, are we free? Are we brave? If we are free the our internet won’t be censored, and if we are brave, we will fight to protect our freedom. God bless America!
Want a window into the minds of our opponents? Former Senator Chris Dodd — head of the Motion Picture Association of America — says that China censors its Internet, so we can too:
“When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites.”
These are the voices our lawmakers listen to. If we’re going to win, we need to drown them out before TOMORROW’s committee vote on SOPA.
Even if you’ve called already, call again. Today is that important. The House Judiciary Committee will likely pass the Stop Online Piracy Act tomorrow, and once the bill moves out of committee, the House can pass it at any time. We could be just days away from seeing internet censorship pass in the House.
Second, urge your friends and family to call Congress today.
Finally, if you have a website, post this call widget and urge your users to make calls:
Paste this code into your website, blog, or Tumblr:
“< iframe src=”http://americancensorship.org/callwidget” width=”588″ height=”625″>”
Or add this script to your site:
“< script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://americancensorship.org/modal/call-client.js”>”
Join us and be a hero for Internet freedom and free speech.
We need you,- Holmes, Tiff, and Fight for the Future
PS: This is it. Please help drive as much traffic as possible to Congress this week!
This is never what we like to hear, but we have to awkowledge the fact that this could pass and that we have very little time to stop it. It is now that we must make the most noise and inform the most people of the danger this bill and all others like it, pose to American values, free speech, and the freedom and openness of the internet that we love. Below is the letter from AmericanCensorship.org.
It’s do-or-die time: The House Judiciary Committee will likely pass the Stop Online Piracy Act THIS Thursday. Once the bill moves out of committee, the House can pass it at any time.
BUT, if we’re able to kill it at this stage it’ll probably never recover.
That’s why we need your help this week: We want to make sure people understand what the Internet could be like if SOPA passes, so we’re asking millions of people to protest censorship as part of our #CensorshipEverywhere campaign — use our tool to censor parts of your own posts to Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and anything and everything else.
Here’s an example of what a censored email would look like:
The most important thing this week is that EVERYONE join the protests in some way. If all of us drive our audiences to make phonecalls, we’re unstoppable. We need to jam Congress’s inboxes and melt their phone lines if we’re going to stop SOPA.
SOPA threatens the livelihood of the best parts of the Internet, and the best companies that use the Internet. More than 70 representatives from leading tech firms — like Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Reddit — and advocacy groups from across the political spectrum participated in a meeting to coordinate action against SOPA.
It was an inspirational meeting, and we’re all going all-in to kill this legislation. We need to do everything we can to stop it in committee — and everything we do this week sends a strong message to lawmakers: voters do not want this bill.
Join us and be a hero for Internet freedom and free speech. We need you,
- David, Holmes, Tiffiniy, and the rest of the team
PS: This is it. Please help drive as much traffic as possible to Congress this week, before Thursday’s vote. Use these links to enlist your friends to fight censorship — you’ll be creating ‘censored’ posts and tweets:
News from our friends at AmericanCensorship.org: We need to get 50K people to call the Senate and scare off support for the Protect IP Act, which is just as bad as SOPA.
Have you woken up from your food coma yet? We don’t have any time to waste.
Sources tell us that Senate leadership could call for a vote on the Internet censorship bill as early as this week, which is why we’re trying to line up as many people as possible to call the Senate on Tuesday.
Ten thousand people have signed up so far, which is awesome. But our goal is to absolutely flood Senators’ phone lines, and that’ll take about 50k calls.
Will you click here to join in, by committing to call your Senator and helping us reach our goal?
Those hundreds of thousands of emails we sent helped scare away a lot of support for the Stop Online Piracy Act — the House’s version of the censorship bill. But the Senate version has been around much longer, and has a stronger core of people advocating for it.
When Hollywood, drug companies, and the Chamber of Commerce come calling, most Senators see dollar signs: More than 30 of them have already said they back the legislation.
That’s why we need to redouble our efforts, steer as many calls as possible into the Senate on Tuesday, and scare off some of the Senators who say they’re likely to support this thing.
While you’re killing time on the internet this weekend, remember that some of your favorite sites might not be there anymore in a few weeks if we don’t win our fight against this terrible legislation.
Holmes Wilson
Fight for the Future / AmericanCensorship.orgP.S. Senator Wyden will fillibuster the censorship bill in the Senate, if it comes to that. Sign this petition from our friends at Demand Progress and Sen. Wyden will read from this list during his fillibuster: StopCensorship.org
