Reddit was among the leaders in the protest movement brought the SOPA/PIPA fast-track to a grinding halt recently and for that they deserve tremendous praise.

While complaining about bad stuff is easy to do, at least with the internet as it's constituted today, coming up with real positive alternative ideas is a lot harder.

Thankfully Reddit has stepped up to the plate with a proposal for the Free Internet Act. Unlike SOPA and PIPA which were largely written in secret by lobbyists for the old-school content industry, FIA is an open-source at attempt at writing legislation. As it stands today, it contains some real common sense ideas for true copyright reform that would enable and encourage creativity rather than stifling it in the name of preserving entrenched business models.

Of course since it's not coming from lobbyists that are proving huge quantities of campaign donations and junkets and it includes common sense ideas, it has absolutely no chance of passage. On the other hand, since the legislators took notice when hundreds of thousands of actual voters stood up and said no, anything is possible.

Go over and take a look at the FIA in progress and then content your senators and representatives and demand that they introduce this bill and vote for it.

#sopa #pipa #freespeech #fia #reddit #congress #freeinternet

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The Free Internet Act is Reddit's crowdsourced SOPA alternative
If you’re fed up with the way the debate about online piracy is going, perhaps you should draft your own legislation like the folks at Reddit. The Free Internet Act is currently open and freely-editable over at Google Docs, and focuses on preventing censorship of nearly any kind. Rather than put the rights of content owners first, the FIA aims to "promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation by preventing the restriction of liberty and preventing the means of censorship." T…

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