The status of the rally (due to weather) is currently: POSTPONED.
If our goal is to educate people, it will be pretty hard to find people to educate today. We’re going to postpone the rally. SOPA will be back in February, and so will we. Sign up for the mailing list below, and I will alert everyone when the event is rescheduled. In the mean time, you can do several things:
- Senator Murray said today: “Protecting IP is vital for jobs & econ in WA, but I have real concerns with SOPA & PIPA as currently drafted. Changes should be made.” This is progress, but we need to make sure she understands that these bills are unacceptable in any form. Continue calling!
- Call Patty Murray from home. You can download A handout of talking points and a suggested script.
- Encourage your friends and neighbors to call. The more people we can educate and get active, the better chance we have of killing these bills.
Don’t know what SOPA or PIPA are?
Then skip to the bottom. If you do, and you want to know how to stop it…
IMPORTANT UPDATES
1.SOPA HAS NOT BEEN SHELVED. IT WILL BE BACK IN FEBRUARY. This is exactly why we need to get out there. They said they were shelving the bill, and then they’re trying to sneak it back in after the press dies down.
What Can You Do?
First, you should call your senator and voice your disapproval. Here is a list of all the Senators, their stance on PIPA, and how to contact them.
Then, on January 18th, in conjunction with blackouts of websites all over the web, we will be having several large events in Seattle.
People will be gathering from 11:30 to 1:30 in Westlake Center, and Amazon Square (South Lake Union), and Bellevue Square.
Our goal will be to talk to people on the streets, educate them about the dangers of SOPA/PIPA, and then convince them to take out their cell phones and call their Senators and Representatives right there, on the sidewalk.
Attendees will have handouts with talking points on why SOPA/PIPA is bad, reference sheets with congressmen and congresswomen’s phone numbers, and a suggested script outlining what someone could tell their representative in Congress.
You can also help by spreading this video:
Join Us
Contact Us
Have questions, comments, requests? Please send them to zaccohn@gmail.com.
So What’s Happening?
The future of the Seattle tech community is in jeopardy. The Internet and information technologies have created a renaissance in startup innovation in Seattle. Thousands of Seattleites have been inspired to become entrepreneurs creating thousands and thousands of new jobs and offering professionals in many of Seattle’s traditional industries the opportunity to start new careers participating in the 21st century global economy.
However, Congress is in the process of rushing through legislation which will not only severely damage the Internet as a marketplace and platform for entrepreneurship and open innovation, but will also seriously impact the ability of our Seattle tech community to continue to generate jobs, grow and flourish. Within the next two weeks, the US Senate is planning to bring the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) S.968 to the floor for a series of votes to ensure its passage.
This legislation would give the government and corporations the ability to censor the net in the name of protecting creativity simply by convincing a judge that a site is “dedicated” to copyright infringement. PIPA would give the government and corporations the ability to shut down any site connected to an accused copyright infringer. Its companion legislation in the House, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), H.R. 3261, contains many similar problems, as well as threatening ordinary users with jail for streaming any copyrighted work – even just video of themselves singing a pop song.
More importantly, the legislation amounts to a wholesale re-engineering of the open web in a way that would allow the US government to prosecute Internet users without due process, which in turn would discourage innovation, limit investment, and hurt the our economic future. You can read and hear more about this dangerous and hurtful legislation here: FightForTheFuture.org/pipa or AmericanCensorship.org.
As much as we agree that infringing on copyrighted material should be eliminated from the web as much as possible, the cure that is being proposed and championed by the lobbying power of major copyright holding organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) will create a cure that is much worse than the disease and irrevocably damage the very nature of the internet and by extension, the future of Seattle.
We believe it is imperative that we stop this bill from passage!
This message has been adopted from our friends at the New York Tech Meetup.