Every bad internet bill in one:TPP has it all...and none of it good

From Fight For The Future:

We need to be as big and visible as possible to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership — that’s the only way we can win this fight. We all need to get as many people in our audiences, readerships, and communities motivated to do something. We can make this powerfully epic, but only if you help. Companies need to be the frontrunners, leaders, and heroes on this because we’ve seen time and time again with SOPA, Reset The Net, and net neutrality that it’s the key ingredient to raising the bar and making sure everyone goes big.

Time is short — Congress is introducing a bill to Fast Track the TPP in the coming weeks, so we need to act now.

We realize it’s a big ask, but this is the kind of bad legislation that only comes along once every 10 or 20 years. The TPP has pieces of every bad Internet policy we’ve fought against, and if it passes now we’ll be kicking ourselves for decades, fighting uphill battle after uphill battle on copyright reform, whistleblower protections, and so much more. Doing the most we can right now is the only rational step to protecting the open Internet.

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So how bad is TPP? This bad:

The biggest problem with the Trans-Pacific Partnership is that there’s absolutely no public oversight. The only way we know what’s in the TPP right now is from leaks of specific chapters -- and if Fast Track passes, not only won’t we get more details about the TPP, Congress will have to give a single thumbs up or down to the entire thing.

That means we won’t be able to push for specific items to be removed from the deal -- we’ll be stuck with the whole thing, so as of right now the Trans-Pacific Partnership will do all of the following:

Force sites to remove allegedly infringing content from the web without a court order - scarily similar to SOPA.

Create harsh criminal penalties for journalists and whistleblowers. Any disclosure of information with "commercial value" would be criminalized -- and there would be absolutely no public interest of free speech exemption.

Punish Internet users who share copyrighted material, even without any personal gain. Here's the proposed punishment from the leaked text: "sentences of imprisonment as well as monetary fines sufficiently high to provide a deterrent to future acts of infringement." Again, that's potential prison time for sharing something without any personal gain.

Limit Fair Use to make copyright even more restrictive on creative innovation. Last week, WikiLeaks revealed a series of emails surrounding the TPP where the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) explicitly argued against including any fair use provisions. And it looks pretty clear that if the TPP passes, they'll have their way. That means remixes, sampling, and quoting of copyrighted material could become illegal outside the US.

Allow foreign corporations to sue the United States government if they think that our laws infringe on their profits. This is, quite simply, the most devastating part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It opens the door to undermining every good law we've ever passed to protect the Internet -- the only thing corporations have to do is prove they could make more money if those laws didn't exist.

In short, the TPP isn’t just bad — it’s zombie bad. It has parts of every misguided Internet policy we’ve killed over the last decade trying to become law by completely bypassing every part of our democratic process.

To oppose TPP click here

SOPA makes a return

From Fight For The Future:

Creepy news: MPAA is on the march, again.

What is the MPAA? They’re the lobby that brought us SOPA. What do they want? The power to censor any website if its users post anything copyrighted (pictures, songs, videos–even links).

Now, leaked emails show they’re getting a corrupt clique of Attorney Generals to do their dirty work and bring back SOPA the sneaky way. The plan is lead by Mississippi AG Jim Hood. Can you help us bury Hood's office in calls & emails?

What’s the problem with censoring whole websites? Well, apart from huge problems with copyright itself, and some serious technical issues, nearly every important website gives its visitors freedom to post stuff. The power to censor entire sites based on users’ behavi or is essentially the power to destroy communities like Reddit, Tumblr, Youtube, Pinterest, or pretty much any place where people express themselves.

Do you want random media companies to have the power to destroy websites? We sure don’t.

Tell Jim Hood that Internet censorship is out of the question. Contact him

In responses to the Huffington Post, Hood called for a list of sites that search engines and ISPs would be legally required to block . Who makes the list? Hood’s friends at the MPAA.

We’ve been through this before. At the behest of MPAA and old media giants, Congress tried to pass SOPA & PIPA. We organized an epic protest, the Internet rose up in magical unison, and the rest is history: Congress shelved the bill.

But unlike Congress, these Attorney Generals never got thousands of angry emails and phone calls. That’s got to change. Tell Jim Hood that you won’t let Internet censorship happen in America.

We only know about these plans thanks to leaked emails from the (itself Hollywood-esque) Sony Pictures hack, and heroic reporting by The Verge (which Sony tried to censor).

The story is too long and crazy to tell here, but if North Korean hackers didn’t hack Sony Pictures while trying to censor a dumb movie mocking their dictatorship, the public might never have discovered these plans to censor America's Internet.

If there was an Oscar for “best ironic blowback", this would win it.

It’s a crazy world. Stand up for what you believe in!

Sincerely,
Holmes Wilson, Tiffiniy Cheng, Evan Greer, Kevin Huang, Jeff Lyon & Vasjen Katro (aka Fight for the Future)

Bullies. That's the only word I can come up with to describe Sony. They have no problem getting in the faces of the American people but if someone bigger than them fucks with them like North Korea they act like the pansies they are. Fucking libtard bullies. That's all Sony is.