Here’s the letter I sent to Congressman Jim McDermott regarding the SOPA bill that is going through Congress tomorrow. I urge you to contact your Congress person as well.
If you don’t know anything about SOPA, please check out this open letter here. And while I hate to be on the same side as Michelle Bachmann in anything I’ll take all the help we can get at this moment.
Find your personal rep’s contact information here.
Please, please read this letter.
As a freelance writer I create content for various places and am one of those people who have to worry about the content I create being stolen. Supposedly, SOPA is designed to protect me. But I am adamantly against this bill.
The internet thrives on freedom: it’s what allows such marvelous sea changes to happen so quickly. No one twenty years ago could have visualized the world that we’re currently living in, and a lot of that is because of the internet and the chances it gives us to be and do whatever we want. We’re truly living in a science fiction reality, a marvelous place where anything is possible.
Right now, the internet is a hopeful place, where anyone can make it, where anyone can work to change the world. Sites like Kickstarter let me support small, unusual projects as a producer, something I would never have enough money to do regularly. Places like Yelp help small businesses thrive through word of mouth rather than large advertising budgets. And new innovations like the applications in the Google and Apple app stores allow unknown developers to create wondrous new things.
SOPA would change that. Innovation might still occur, but rather than happening in the United States it will happen elsewhere. The new Facebooks and Googles will not happen here, they will happen abroad. And once we fall behind the curve I fear we will never, ever be able to catch up.
I can defend my own creative content, as can others. It requires work but so does most of what makes life worthwhile. SOPA is not the answer to piracy, especially not with its current vague wording.
I urge you to vote against SOPA tomorrow. Please vote against the stifling of innovation. Please vote against censorship. Please let us continue to dream this wonderful futuristic dream.
I’m counting on you.
Megan Durham
Other great links to look into:
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/02/stephen-colbert-explains-sopa.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/109533-how-sopa-could-actually-break-the-internet
http://torrentfreak.com/sopa-will-mean-the-end-of-reddit-says-general-manager-111219/