On October 26, 2011, the House version of the Internet Blacklist Bill was introduced and Congress is now debating it. Under this bill, “the Department of Justice would force search engines, browsers, and service providers to block users’ access to websites that have been accused of copyright infringement — without even giving them a day in court.” (Demand Progress)
According to Digital Journal, this bill “could shut down YouTube, Twitter and many other social websites that bring together the Occupy movements across the nation and world—any user-generated content site where the law can make the sites’ owners legally responsible for the posted content of its users.”
Back when we hosted our blog on blogger, we received a notice from them saying we had violated copyright on a post that was about a synchronicity connected to Hoover Dam. We took down the post, but Rob was so ticked off he wrote to the Department of the Interior and told them about what had happened. A woman in the department said the post didn’t violate any copyright, as the story was public information, and she couldn’t imagine who had reported it as such. She said her email constituted permission to use the post. We never re-posted the story.
The Internet Blacklist Bill could censor on such a vast scale that it would make Google’s Big Brother tactics look pitiful. And it wouldn’t just impact websites, blogs and services in the U.S. This would threaten Internet freedom worldwide.
We signed this petition, which has nearly 600,000 signatures.
They have been itching to limit internet freedom since the Bush administration.
The current Congress is reinterpreting the Constitution in terms of the “corporations are people” thing, for the benefit of Wall Street and corporations. Huff Po and Rolling Stone released stories w/in the past 2 weeks, showing how they have been bought and paid for.
This morning I also found this: https://www.politicususa.com/en/ows-hit-job.
Boehner & cohorts have ordered a $1,000,000 hit job on Occupy Wall Street.
Whose money? What happen to their “less spending, less government chant”? They really mean less spending on “we-the-people” and less involvement in government by “we-the-people”.
They need we-the-people to be poor, ignorant, and complacent.
Off to sign the petition!
Signed it. I do want to add something, though, and hope everyone doesn’t become angry with me about this. There needs to be a way to control the use of the social networks by children. I don’t have any idea how that can be accomplished, because PARENTS should be the monitors, and they aren’t doing the job. This means some type of internal mechanical settings, (available parental controls such as TVs and cellphones have), should be installed into the social networking sites that would disallow kids and young teens to access them, thus eliminating the possibility of use by minor children, who are now much more computer and electronically savvy than 99% of adults. As a family, we’ve had a very recent extremely dangerous, life-threatening situation involving our 13-year-old granddaughter that reached her through her facebook page. If we hadn’t caught it in time, she would have been snatched and dead, or worse than dead. Children are NOT SUPPOSED to be allowed to create facebooks. There is an age limit there. However, all the child needs to do is put his or her birth year a few years earlier than it actually is, and bingo! A facebook page.
So while I vehemently agree with everything in the post and have certainly signed the petition, I also strongly support some type of adjustments in the wide open availability to children. It wouldn’t require government interference. It could be done with software and/or other options. Again, because in general, parents are NOT monitoring their children’s use of electronics, and this negligence is resulting in horrible nightmares across this country and around the world. Be that as it may, I signed the petition and agree with the info in the post re government interference, etc. As an aside, our 11 and 13 year old granddaughters have lost their cellphones and computers. They don’t yet need the computers for schoolwork, and the cellphones are nor essential items because they have access to landlines wherever they go in the event of emergencies. They are both now hating the cruel grown-ups who took their “toys”, but we love them enough to endure their hate and remove the very real and present dangers. We can’t be with them 24/7, so we had no choice but to remove the source of that particular danger. Children this young are living in a time when they are far too knowledgable about adult issues, (ie, sexuality), yet far too young to comprehend the implications and consequences of their words and actions on social networks and the tricks of lurking predators and pedophiles. It has become a major and widespread dilemma.
cousin cj – that is such an issue i know – but there are several things available to help parents/grandparents with that very thing – there is netnanny or norton – and this article says that you can also find preventative things on your pc –
https://www.labnol.org/software/browsers/block-websites-from-kids-home-computer/1602/
I signed it the other day. One more way to control the flow of information.
Just sent we put this up, the signings have soared past 661,000. To me, that sure indicates that people understand what’s at stake.
wow, thanks. I signed the petition and passed it on. Yes, it’s very scary. As Bill Moyers famously pointed out, the media has been almost completely taken over by commercial interest, with only a few public stations anymore. The internet really is the only truly open media, and what a huge transformer it has been, truly evolutionary. Freedom of speech and information is the true basis of the “American dream”………. this would be terrible.
I received a notice about “copyright” material once myself from Blogger, and simply eliminated the post on my blog, although it was really nothing that would have mattered to anyone, as far as I could understand. Scary.
Lauren – Gypsy – thanks for signing the petition! I hope they get a million signatures!
Yeah, the media is pretty much ignoring this.
As a side-note I came across this funny clip over at Dedriodify’s blog.
https://dedroidify.blogspot.com/2011/11/batman-is-1.html
I Love it.
The Joker must be laughing his head off over this one .-)
Good one, Daz!!
OMGosh! shades of 1984 indeed! cameras on every corner in every business on every rooftop on every street – internet tagging and flagging – takin’ ‘way our names and givin’ us numbers – identity this identity that – voice recognition facial recognition eye recognition – first amendment burned at stake – peaceful protesters arrested – military weapons carried by every bubba and drug dealer in the country – carrying weapons into colleges made legal – every move recorded and reported to some government entity somewhere – concentration camps made ready all across the country – chemtrails pouring down poison – industry poisoning the air and the water -glaciers falling apart – natural disasters rampant all over the globe – the planet is off axis – the sun is angry more and more frequently – there’s no cure for the common cold – and the government wants still more control over citizens – well, i voted ’em into office and i can vote ’em out of office – or so i like to think – and in the meantime – i’m signing the petition –
peace and love –
You hit every salient point! Orwell was a few decades early!
just re-reading my own words gave me cold chills!
‘Cause you said it all so well!
Sounds like lyrics to a protest song, Gyps!
well, then, let’s do it! 😉
I’m sure a lot of governments would like to control what is on the Internet – we have to do our best to ensure that this never happens.
It seems like most governments these days.
Thanks for talking about this….it’s been mostly missing in the media….just like the OWS…signed it…..and hope it’s going to be enough to put an end to these threats on our internet freedom. What next?
I suspect some politician will think of another way to limit our freedoms!
Sounds to me like a sneaky way to get around the First Amendment to the Constitution and to “control the information”. Copyright is a sticky area. In my job, I deal with copyright and the whole point is that we can’t make money off of someone else’s creation and have to pay a royalty to the appropriate owners of the songs we use.
Passing such a law would increase the size of government and bring us closer to Orwell’s “1984”, with censoring agents monitoring everything that appears online. If such a law passes, I would hope that it would be the last straw for the American people and cause an uproar so massive and loud that the government would back down from it and the people who support it would be removed from office.
We’ll see how it shakes out. I agree with you 100 percent, Nicholas!