“The Internet” (Used 2 times)

You may have noticed that freemusicarchive.org, is still accessible.  We'd prefer to stay online even as we stand with the 7000+ sites who are voluntarily blacked out to send a message to the U.S. Congress.  It's unclear whether the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) could actually stop online piracy, but it's clear that these proposed laws would threaten a lot of healthy online activity -- including those that support independent artists.

SOPA and PIPA would give the mainstream entertainment industry new powers to shut down websites that threaten their established way of doing business.  No due process necessary; just add a site to their blacklist, and service providers' arms would be twisted into actively monitoring and censoring independent voices.

The web provides access to media that was once shut out by narrow industry bottlenecks.  Here at the FMA, we're proud to see so many artists, curators, and producers working together to reach new audiences through open sharing.  It may seem that the web was designed to allow for these types of exchanges, but as with every new mode of communication from the telephone to radio to cable television, eventually The Man steps in to seize control.  Is the internet any different?  That's what's up in the air right now.

US people: click here to let your reps know how you feel about internet censorship.

Read up at EFF  +  Public Knowledge  +  Wikipedia  +  Future of Music Coalition  +  Creative Commons  +  Center for Democracy & Technology  +  Google + thousands of other websites + what a fun day to be alive and online + read SOPA and PIPA

PS If you're not one of the two million people to have already watched it, check out this Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike video by Kirby Ferguson (Everything is a Remix) / Fight for the Future featuring CC music shared alike by YACHT, Broke For Free and Windom Earle.

This new video by Fight for the Future and Kirby Ferguson (Everything is a Remix) is well worth checking out.

It's a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA video that incorporates awesome music by artists who share their work under video-safe licenses via the FMA (credits at the end).

The video describes a new bill that is moving quickly through congress under the misleading name "Protect Intellectual Property Act" as a disingenuous threat to the basic structure of the web:

"The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites-- they just have to convince a judge that the site is 'dedicated to copyright infringement.' The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior."

PIPA would give the government and corporations the ability to censor the net in the name of protecting "creativity," which when you look at the details seems counterintuitive. If you're an artist who want to tell congress that you actually feel empowered by the Internet, and threatened rather by this bill, Fight for the Future drafted a letter to congress from artists here, while a more general letter can be found here.