I'm a little late in the game, but thought I'd go ahead and join the bandwagon to help to attempt to stop the wackiness that Congress is trying to put forth. Below is a letter the CEO of Etsy wrote which explains it best. When I realized this ridiculousness could potentially result in shutting down Etsy and Paypal and [fill in the blank] I was completely shocked. For more information click
here.
Original letter posted on November 23, 2011
Lawmakers are debating legislation in the U.S. Congress that we at
Etsy believe is unnecessary, over-reaching, and ultimately harmful to
the fabric of the Internet.
The legislation — the
PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the
Stop Online Piracy Act
(SOPA) in the House of Representatives — grants copyright owners
unprecedented power to block or shut down websites entirely for
copyright infringements that are already being successfully addressed
via existing laws.
We know that this is a concern for
some of you in the Etsy community,
too. We wanted to let you know that we have contacted our
representatives to oppose this legislation. In doing so, we stand with
AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo! and
Zynga (see
their letter). We also stand with friends in our local New York City community who are against the legislation,
Tumblr and
Kickstarter.
Our protest of this specific legislation does not mean that we
support piracy or platforms that promote piracy. Etsy is a community of
creators and we take intellectual property very seriously. Like other
major Internet companies, we have
a clear policy and set of procedures
in place for dealing with infringing content under the 1998 Digital
Millennium Copyright Act. We have been successfully working with
rightsholders to enforce those policies since Etsy was founded in 2005.
But under SOPA, anyone who is a "holder of an intellectual property
right harmed by the activities" of even one shop on Etsy, could
hypothetically serve our technology partners (e.g. payment processors,
hosting services) with a notice that would require them to suspend
Etsy's service within 5 days. That means that a trademark violation in
one shop could affect everyone’s business.
We are asking our lawmakers to defeat these bills and to
work with the Internet community to come up with tailored, appropriate
solutions that enhance innovation and creativity, rather than risk
harming the foundations of the Internet for everyone based on the
actions of a few.
We encourage you to educate yourselves about this legislation, starting with the
Protect Innovation
site built by some of the Internet companies listed above, many of
which you probably use every day. The Protect Innovation site provides a
simple tool for you to find your representatives and also provides sample letters that you can edit and send to them.
We hope you'll join us in opposing these bills.
Chad Dickerson
CEO, Etsy
