Today Tomorrow is American Censorship Day, marking the start of congressional hearings on H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act. As the website Public Knowledge puts it, “This bill seriously screws with the Internet.” Creative Commons explains:
SOPA would drastically increase both the costs and risks of providing platforms for sharing and collaboration (think sites ranging from individual blogs to massive community projects such as Wikipedia, from open education repositories to Flickr and YouTube), and vaporize accessibility to huge swathes of free culture, whether because running a platform becomes too costly, or [because] a single possibly infringing item causes an entire domain to be taken down. [My emphasis.]Related reading
Text of H.R. 3261 (Public Knowledge)
Urgent: Stop [U.S.] American censorship of the Internet (Creative Commons)
If you’re
[Oops: the sixteenth is tomorrow, not today. But better early than never.]
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One of my students noted that the Internet is perhaps among the most radical steps in the evolution of society worldwide. While political sides might rage against their opposites, the fact of a free Internet is that opinions are not easily silenced. He added that both political parties have an interest in "control" because freedom is a narrative which is as radical as the Internet's ability to support it. I agree, and have learned from a student yet again.
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