Stand Together: The Gaming Community vs SOPA and PIPA (and the ESA)

I support this message!

Original video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp8S8eJkMW8

Sign a petition to have the ESA, whom you may recognize as the folks that run E3, remove their support from SOPA and PIPA here - http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-the-esa-petition-and-boycott-e3

You can download the video here so that you can gather more support by uploading it anywhere else (please do): http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VQ0JZFQK

If you're a United States citizen, and you want to petition against SOPA and PIPA directly, go here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-p...

Personally, I am opposed to software piracy for moral reasons. After all, even the folks that make those games, music, movies, etc. need money in order to stay in business. However, I don't think that censorship is the solution. In fact, I believe that these bills would cause far more harm in the internet than it would help, not just here in the United States, but throughout the entire world.

The measures that are being proposed seem so vaguely worded that, while blacklisting sites that actively pirate media, such as, say, The Pirate Bay, is all fine and dandy, blacklisting sites that link to other blacklisted sites (even if the links were located in, say, a forum post or blog) seems rather draconian, since that could mean that innocent sites, including Facebook, YouTube, Google, and Wikipedia, could suddenly find themselves blacklisted until their innocence is proven or their links to blacklisted sites are taken down. This would force innocent websites to actively police their content to avoid getting blacklisted, and would also mean that many jobs would be lost. Finally, if this gets passed, I fear that this could establish a precedent for other nations to follow and build upon.

Given the current state of the United States's stability, what with the Occupy movements and all that, I fear that, if something this infringing gets passed into law, then it would spark massive outrage throughout the United States, perhaps even to the point of causing our government to collapse, like with what had happened in Russia during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I really hope that it doesn't happen, which is why I'm urging you, the viewers, to take action. If you're a United States citizen, then please contact your representative and tell them that you're not going to take this kind of crap.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• SOPA
• PIPA
• ESA
• E3
• Electronic
• Entertainment
• Expo
• Freedom
• of
• Speech
• Software
• Association
• Stop
• Online
• Piracy
• Act
• Protect
• IP
• Internet