You might notice that the Paradux Media Group site has gone dark today, January 18, 2012. We’re joining thousands of concerned businesses and individuals nationwide to protest the  “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) that was introduced into the House of Representatives on October 26, 2011 as bill HR 3261 and “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011” (PIPA), which was introduced into the Senate on May 12, 2011 as Senate Bill 968.

These bills, if passed will jeopardize internet freedom and shift the power of the independent web into the hands of a few corporations. If you haven’t heard much about SOPA or PIPA, take a moment to learn what it’s all about by watching the video above.

The bottomline here, if we don’t act, we’re permitting censorship and the intervention of large corporations in what has become the primary information exchange system in our country and the world. Just in the last 12 months, we’ve seen governments overthrown, major scandals exposed, and begun to turn to social media, bloggers and online content for our news and information sources – to the detriment of traditional news corporations.

These bills jeopardize that freedom of information in the most fundamental ways, allowing corporations to eliminate any site they feel poses a threat to their copyrights. Now, I’m all for copyrights and protecting intellectual property, but that’s not what these bills will do in reality. Any site, Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, Paradux Media Group, you name it could be censored at a moment’s notice because a corporation  believed one link, one post, one piece of information would violate it’s copyright.

The aggregate result? The US Government “could order the blocking of sites using methods similar to those employed by China. Among other things, search engines could be forced to delete entire websites from their search results.” This level of censorship would have a dramatic effect on employment in the USA — think of all those internet jobs that could become obsolete.

Now that you know what’s at stake – take a moment to let Congress know what you think about these bills by letting your Congressional Representative know that you do NOT want it to pass – it’s quick, easy, and painless, and it could be the difference between censorship and freedom on the Internet.

“Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people’s heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silver-fish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches.”
~Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451

About the Author:

Tisha Oehmen

Tisha Oehmen is a professional brand strategist and a leader in the branding field. She has been named a member of the Global Guru’s Top 30 Brand Gurus. She is also the co-founder of Oregon-based Paradux Media Group and the best-selling author of the book, Finding Brand: The Brand Book Tutorial.

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