Emergency NY Tech Meetup SOPA/PIPA protest Wednesday at Sens. Schumer and Gillibrand's offices

Andrew sez,

The New York Tech Meetup, a 20,000 member community of people working in the New York Tech Industry are protesting the pending legislation in the US Senate called Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and its companion legislation in the House of Representatives, called Stop Online Piracy Act, (SOPA). These proposals pose a great threat to the open web by making censorship possible by the US government and corporations without due process. Although we agree piracy of intellectual property should be stopped, these laws if passed as currently written would have a chillingly negative effect of free speech around the world.
We are gathering this Wednesday at 12:30 PM in NYC in front of the offices of Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, (who are sponsors of PIPA). Our effort is aimed to show are collective dismay through our physical presence in solidarity with all the other online protests planned for that day by a consortium of sites in support of the open Internet. You can read about them. Please join us by signing up here and please tweet, blog, and inform all your various networks.

(Thanks, Andrew!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Copyfight • Event • nyc • pipa • protest • sopa

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http://twitter.com/KatManalac Kathrina Manalac

Silicon Valley is organizing a protest on 1/18 as well: http://www.hackersandfounders.com/events/48317262/
- Finnagain
  
  1/18th scale? Isn’t that a bit small?
cm

I don’t get why everyone discussing SOPA has to add the caveat “while we agree that piracy of IP is bad…” Are they THAT fearful?

The fact is that we haven’t had a decent conversation about what actually constitutes “piracy” and, more importantly, “intellectual property” in the modern era. Much of the piracy issue can be traced to personal greed, sure, but there’s also a debate to be had about whether IP is really IP just because corporate-controlled courts SAY it is. If we come to a more universally acceptable standard definition of IP, then suddenly the breadth of “piracy” becomes smaller, and we find out that people weren’t stealing as much stuff as they told us.

These organizations can “go dark”and whine all day long about SOPA, but so long as they adopt the language, definitions and de facto thinking of the people BEHIND these laws, they are illustrating their lack of insight on the issue, and coming off as opportunists, not people with an actual heartfelt position.
http://twitter.com/lrw Leah W.

It would be great if someone who tweets at NYC311 could promote this.