Dear U.S. Citizens,

There has been a string of United States Senate bills that are a threat to our economy, and a violation to our First Amendment Rights, and they must be stopped in their tracks. I urge you to tell your U.S. Senators about your concerns.

The S.978 bill (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:s978:) is a gross oversight in giving even more rights to the individual ownership of copyright, and taking away rights of the people that make it possible for creative works to be produced. It is harmful to our shared commons of creativity. Works build upon ideas of others, and by limiting our options to do so, is against the advancement of the state of art. It’s only to motivate the division of private spaces, as being creative in a public space, a Public Performance, comes with the potential of a lawsuit and a felony conviction.

The S.968 bill (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:s968:) gives more freedom to the U.S. government for censorship. Anyone who will or currently owns a domain name is at risk, and through willful copyright infringement will become at risk to having their domain name seized that has its Domain Name Server (DNS) under control of the U.S. Government. Copyright infringement is wrong, and those that are infringing are in the wrong. However we don’t need the potential for mis-use and corruption and increasing hostility to law-abiding Citizens that place great importance to online economy.

These bills are a contributory cause to the death to much of our American culture of “freedom”, that has made our country famous across the world. They must be stopped in their tracks! It has been a downward spiral since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, allowing among other things for copyright laws to be “continuously renewed”, take a look at “THX 1138″ at http://cocatalog.loc.gov/. What would have gone into the Public Domain fifty to sixty years from now, won’t likely enter Public Domain until around 2108, for a movie that was published in 1971, forty years ago. The computer has lead the way to laws being enacted, making our laws increasingly more oppressive for those who don’t even have a computer. A sign that things truly have gone into turmoil.

We need the government to take a stance against the individual owners of existing copyrights to stop them from taking away the rights of Citizens and treating everyone as if they are already a criminal, just because Citizens are liberated with our own ability to copy creative works. We need the government to stand up for a commons of creativity. To bring back copyright law before the DMCA of 1998, so that creative works can not be endlessly renewed, such as “THX 1138″ has been since 1998. We need a new revision that states that copyright laws do not apply to electronically distributed and transmitted creative works, it only applies to the manufacture, copying, and distribution of “mechanicals” and physical works, to which copyright laws have been born out of the inherit limitations of “the laws of physics”. The computer has been our liberator from the oppression of treating ideas like objects, a.k.a. “Intellectual Property”. This kind of law will motivate the production of real physical works, and gives jobs to many that are struggling and unemployed, and truly embracing the nature of the computer.

Sincerely,
Braydon Fuller
Los Angeles, California

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