A protest

My name is Rebekah Chung, and I am a university student in opposition to the SOPA/PIPA bills proposed last year. 

I believe that the internet is an important tool for today's world, and that the censorship threatening it would be intensely crippling.  The free sharing of information online has been a major factor in developing today's information age, allowing people to share cultures, intellectual property, and countless other benefits across the planet.  While internet censorship might protect the property of copyright owners, it would also change the very culture that those individuals cater to, more than likely harming them more than piracy and plagiarism ever could.

The internet may house a great amount of injustice towards copyright owners, but it is also a huge base for the population that buys their property and on which they are dependent.  Hindering musical communities online would hurt the music industry more than harm it, severely slowing the spread of artists' names, for one.  No advertising campaign will ever be as effective as the viral spread of material that occurs in online communities.

Even more importantly, the internet is a huge center for human creativity.  In a system where budding artists are not permitted to experiment and practice with the works of their literary, artistic, or musical heroes through fanart, fanfiction, and other such works, many shy, tentative young minds are robbed of the opportunity to garner critiques and develop their own voices. 

To suppose that the majority of fanbased work that comprises a huge aspect of the internet is a harm to established is a blatant mistake quickly refuted by any familiarity with the actual dynamic that goes on.  Most works online that might be labeled plagiarism are more comparable to hero-worship than robbery, and the results are not the usurpation of artists but the spread of their work and names.  To cripple this nexus of creativity and artistic development is to cling to older works at the cost of the future, to cheat future generations of their potential in favor of what is quickly being outdated.

"Imitation is the highest form of flattery," it has often been said.  Any artist or thinker who thinks himself hurt or offended by the works derived from his pre-established foundations must be in doubt of the impact, quality, and importance of his work and supremely uninterested in the potential of such work as a foundation for future development.  To indulge these figures is to indulge those who are more interested in their personal gain than in the development of humanity, in the progress and good of his country, and in the development and dynamicism of art itself, in the case of artists.  To indulge these figures is a crime.

Realize, please, that the internet bears a great significance on the development of humanity over the coming generations, and that U.S. censorship would set our country behind the development (artistic, cultural, intellectual, technological) of the rest of the world.  The sharing of information speeds up progress by offering to everyone the resources they would otherwise have to develop individually, over and over, redundantly.  Keeping the internet uncensored is not only in the interest of developing artists, but it is in in the best interests of our country.

So to our representatives, in whom we have placed our confidence... Vote down SOPA/PIPA.  Vote down obsolescence, rust, and stagnancy.  Vote to support the creativity of today's youth and the development of technology.  Vote for internet freedom.