Petition Congress: Protect the Internet for Innovators!

Rachel Maddow highlighted this petition on her MSNBC show -- watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIWBbwSE_PI&feature=youtu.be

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has put the anti-Internet bill on hold! But the fight continues as the Senate prepares for a vote soon. 

Join over 230,000 others in signing the reddit/PCCC petition to Congress -- help us reach 250,000.

PETITION TO CONGRESS: Don’t let big corporations use lobbyists and government regulations to censor the Internet and block innovators from inventing the next reddit, YouTube, or Google. Protect free speech and innovation online.

After you sign, you'll get activism emails from the PCCC -- including informing you when your representatives will vote on this horrible bill.

BACKGROUND:

YouTube started as a project in a garage. If a big company like Viacom thought a video violated copyright law, Viacom couldn't stop YouTube's site from working. Viacom couldn't break YouTube's links. Viacom couldn't force the kids who invented YouTube to spend millions in court that they didn't have.

Instead, under the law, Viacom would have to contact YouTube, make the case, and allow YouTube to decide if the case had merit. YouTube had a "safe harbor" of time to voluntarily take infringing video down. And if Viacom's case didn't have merit, YouTube had the option of engaging in a more lengthy/costly legal battle. 

Because of this due process, investors in YouTube knew that big corporations couldn't litigate YouTube to death. This allowed innovation to thrive.

If the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (aka SOPA and Protect-IP Act) passes Congress, all of this would change. Innovative sites would be taken down by others without due process -- like what happens in China. That's why the founders of reddit, Google, eBay, Wikipedia, Craigslist, and others are fighting this bill

Join the fight -- sign the petition on the right.

BACKGROUND: An Open Letter from Top Innovators

We’ve all had the good fortune to found Internet companies and nonprofits in a regulatory climate that promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, the creation of content and free expression online.

However we’re worried that the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act — which started out as well-meaning efforts to control piracy online — will undermine that framework.

These two pieces of legislation threaten to:

• Require web services, like the ones we helped found, to monitor what users link to, or upload. This would have a chilling effect on innovation;
• Deny website owners the right to due process of law;
• Give the U.S. Government the power to censor the web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran; and
• Undermine security online by changing the basic structure of the Internet.

We urge Congress to think hard before changing the regulation that underpins the Internet. Let’s not deny the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders the same opportunities that we all had.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch
David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post
Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and co-founder of Alexa Internet
Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal
Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist
Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
Biz Stone, co-founder of Obvious and Twitter
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation
Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter
Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!

Join the fight -- sign the petition on the right.