Thread: SOPA & PIPA dropped!!!!!!!!!!

Hi everyone!

A big hurrah to you!!!!! We’ve won for now -- SOPA and PIPA were dropped by Congress today -- the votes we’ve been scrambling to mobilize against have been cancelled.

The largest online protest in history has fundamentally changed the game. You were heard.

On January 18th, 13 million of us took the time to tell Congress to protect free speech rights on the internet. Hundreds of millions, maybe a billion, people all around the world saw what we did on Wednesday. See the amazing numbers here and tell everyone what you did.

This was unprecedented. Your activism may have changed the way people fight for the public interest and basic rights forever.


The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled. “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA Chairman and former Senator Chris Dodd told the New York Times. ‘[PIPA and SOPA were] considered by many to be a slam dunk.’”

“'This is altogether a new effect,' Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing 'an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically' in the last four decades, he added."

Tweet with us, shout on the internet with us, let's celebrate: Round of applause to the 13 million people who stood up - #PIPA and #SOPA are tabled 4 now. #13millionapplause



We're indebted to everyone who helped in the beginning of this movement -- you, and all the sites that went out on a limb to protest in November -- Boing Boing and Mozilla Foundation (and thank you Tumblr, 4chan)! And the grassroots groups -- Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, CDT, and many more.

#SOPA and #PIPA will likely return in some form. But when they do, we'll be ready. Can you make a donation to Fight for the Future, to help us keep this fire going?



We changed the game this fall, and we're not gonna stop. $8, $20, every little bit helps.

13 million strong,

Tiffiniy, Holmes, Joshua, Phil, CJ, Donny, Douglas, Nicholas, Dean, David S. and Moore... Fight for the Future!


P.S. China's internet censorship system reminds us why the fight for democratic principles is so important:

In the New Yorker: "Fittingly, perhaps, the discussion has unfolded on Weibo, the Twitter-like micro-blogging site that has a team of censors on staff to trim posts with sensitive political content. That is the arrangement that opponents of the bill have suggested would be required of American sites if they are compelled to police their users’ content for copyright violations. On Weibo, joking about SOPA’s similarities to Chinese censorship was sensitive enough that some posts on the subject were almost certainly deleted (though it can be hard to know).
...
After Chinese Web users got over the strangeness of hearing Americans debate the merits of screening the Web for objectionable content, they marvelled at the American response. Commentator Liu Qingyan wrote:

‘We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics.’"

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(press release is here: https://fightfortheftr.wordpress.com/press-releases/)

Win !

this is great news. ever since 9/11 the US gov't has been slowly trying to take our rights away. Sorry greedy companies, 13+ million people wont allow you blatantly limit our freedom of the web just for the sake of your greedy agendas. I will not be supporting any pro SOPA companies for a long time.

good to hear we have won

We haven't won anything. This just slowed them down, causing them take it back to the drawing board so they can see how they can revamp it in order to get it to pass. Companies who are wanting to control what is published and where it's published, isn't going to stop.

i cant accept the fact that megaupload is down. gonna go cry under my blanket alone.

I'll tell you one thing, the people running our nations are a ****ing run away train that need derailed. "Permanently".

We may have won on these bills but that's not good enough. Look what the US Government is doing now. They took down MU. More filehosting sites are surely to come. We all know filehosting sites are the biggest provider of copyrighted files. If they take down the other big ones then we're still in trouble even if these bills have failed. BTW, this isn't Playstation News.

yep. more will lose. its a win and lose battle.

Originally Posted by ireggae

yep. more will lose. its a win and lose battle.

Please check my latest post from the Staff Talk thread ireggae. This thread needs to be moved to General Chat but I can't do it. I explained why from the Staff Talk thread.