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soundingsea
If you're reading this, chances are good that you're in transformative works fandom. Maybe you're into fanfic, or podfic, or meta. Maybe you are all about the fanart - icons and other graphics. Perhaps you're in vidding fandom or make fanmixes or you cosplay. Maybe you're an archivist or a beta or a roleplayer. Maybe you run landcomms or challenges or memes. Maybe your fandom is Jane Austen, and maybe it's figure skating, and maybe it's whatever TV show your friends wouldn't stop talking about and then you fell for the characters and needed MOAR.
You probably have websites you use for fandom - Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Archive of Our Own, deviantART, Fanfiction.net, Tumblr, Twitter, and more. And your fannish endeavors might very well involve playing in someone else's sandbox; corporations own Buffy Summers and Rodney McKay and Kurt Hummel and Olivia Dunham. We use them, we don't profit from the use, and we're pretty sure nobody's going to mistake an AU J2 big bang fic where they're Cowboys quarterbacks for an episode of Supernatural. But disclaimers aren't good enough for these companies. You know who hates our freedoms? Big media, that's who.
There's censorship a-brewin' in the US. Two bills currently under discussion (SOPA and PIPA) are designed to yank away any website ACCUSED of infringing content (without any kind of due process). We're not just talking about torrent sites; we're talking about anything anyone accuses of being infringement (like say, a vid). We're talking about any site with user-generated content (and therefore LINKS to other stuff) being at risk of being forced offline; like, no more livejournal.com because it might have a link somewhere to filefactory.com. This isn't some Snopes-debunkable chain mail, folks; the internet as we know it is in big trouble.
If you've gone to Google or the English Wikipedia or Boingboing or AO3 today, you'll see what I'm talking about. This is the real deal. We stand together, or we fall together.
If you're in the US, call your congresscritters; Wikipedia has a zip-code lookup to make it easy . If you're not, tell your USian peeps about this, so they can.
soundingseaIf you're reading this, chances are good that you're in transformative works fandom. Maybe you're into fanfic, or podfic, or meta. Maybe you are all about the fanart - icons and other graphics. Perhaps you're in vidding fandom or make fanmixes or you cosplay. Maybe you're an archivist or a beta or a roleplayer. Maybe you run landcomms or challenges or memes. Maybe your fandom is Jane Austen, and maybe it's figure skating, and maybe it's whatever TV show your friends wouldn't stop talking about and then you fell for the characters and needed MOAR.
You probably have websites you use for fandom - Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Archive of Our Own, deviantART, Fanfiction.net, Tumblr, Twitter, and more. And your fannish endeavors might very well involve playing in someone else's sandbox; corporations own Buffy Summers and Rodney McKay and Kurt Hummel and Olivia Dunham. We use them, we don't profit from the use, and we're pretty sure nobody's going to mistake an AU J2 big bang fic where they're Cowboys quarterbacks for an episode of Supernatural. But disclaimers aren't good enough for these companies. You know who hates our freedoms? Big media, that's who.
There's censorship a-brewin' in the US. Two bills currently under discussion (SOPA and PIPA) are designed to yank away any website ACCUSED of infringing content (without any kind of due process). We're not just talking about torrent sites; we're talking about anything anyone accuses of being infringement (like say, a vid). We're talking about any site with user-generated content (and therefore LINKS to other stuff) being at risk of being forced offline; like, no more livejournal.com because it might have a link somewhere to filefactory.com. This isn't some Snopes-debunkable chain mail, folks; the internet as we know it is in big trouble.
If you've gone to Google or the English Wikipedia or Boingboing or AO3 today, you'll see what I'm talking about. This is the real deal. We stand together, or we fall together.
If you're in the US, call your congresscritters; Wikipedia has a zip-code lookup to make it easy . If you're not, tell your USian peeps about this, so they can.
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