Your Freedom of Speech is in Jeopardy!

Please favorite, copy, pass on, tweet, raise a banner in the street outside your house, etc. This message needs to get out, however you can. I'm serious about this. The topic of this journal could change the very way we can use and enjoy the freedom of speech and the internet.

Two bills are going through Congress as we speak (One through the Senate and one simultaneously through the House) that seek to restrict and punish acts that we now see as harmless freedoms.

"Under current practice, copyright owners such as TV networks and Hollywood studios reach out to websites to request that pirated videos be taken down. Under the new regime, they could ask banks, Internet service providers and domain name registrars to stop doing business with websites that they believed were devoted to piracy. They could, for instance, go straight to YouTube's domain registration company and demand that the entire YouTube website be taken down. And if the registrar resisted, the copyright owners would have the legal ability to take the registrar to court." According to the Huffington Post www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11…

To put this in perspective. It won't be that your "art" or "videos" will be taken down... you simply won't have the ability to share them as the websites that you would have used would be taken down or castrated (definition: to deprive of strength, power, or efficiency; weaken: dictionary.reference.com/brows… ) by the new legal regulations.

And, we're already on the losing side. According to the same article, "Both political parties -- flush with campaign contributions from Hollywood studios and trial lawyers -- are eager to pass the legislation."

All the money... I mean power- in the world seems conspired against Freedom. As those who will gain from this are not the American public, but the people who already have the money from their pockets.

And Foreign websites and web-businesses are not free from this censorship either, under recent rewrites the twin bills seek more aggression: "The Senate bill proposes to give copyright owners those new powers to sue over foreign websites only."

The prospects are pretty bleak.

We have our own supporters of Free Speech... in "AOL Inc., eBay Inc., Facebook, Yahoo Inc. and Twitter." The largest company on our side is "Google" (also the owner of YouTube).

But, many of these companies are laughable voices in the legal world. Google is facing "an antitrust investigation as well as government scrutiny for directing consumers to unregulated online pharmacies," something that didn't go unnoticed when it spoke out against the legislation before "representatives of Hollywood studios, pharmaceutical giants and intellectual property hawks from the Obama administration."

There is very little that we can do. We are simply a chorus of voices... and it's money that runs the world these days. But, the theory is, enough voices can change the world; topple the walls of Jericho. We just have to collect those voices.

There are a few petitions (that I myself have signed) where we can oppose the powers that be. Please, it only takes a few minutes of your time:

www.change.org/petitions/stop-…

americancensorship.org/

The other thing we can do is spread the word. Copy my journal as is, or write your own (as I did) here and in other places to  get the word out! I only learned about it today... and it's so very close to passing.

I beg you... don't sit idly by and let these things happen.

YOU have the power to change the world. GO AND USE IT! Before that power is stripped from you.

Thanks for reading
-Matt