Congress May Outlaw Memes

The European Union has already launched a war on memes (see here, here, and here). Now Congress follows suit:

A bi-partisan bill working its way through Congress could drastically change how copyright claims are processed, and would create a system to impose up to $30,000 in fines on anyone who shares protected material online.

In other words, the Congress wants to make it easier to sue people who send a meme or post images that they didn’t create themselves, essentially a giveaway to lawyers who sue unsuspecting suckers for a living.

Already, copyright trolls have forced Moonbattery.com to stop using graphics that are not embedded so as to avoid legal fees. The situation is about to get worse.

From the Copyright Alliance, which hopefully won’t sue me for quoting them:

On July 18, 2019, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed S. 1273, the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2019 (CASE Act), legislation that will provide U.S. creators with a viable means for defending their copyrighted works through the creation of a small claims tribunal within the U.S. Copyright Office.

Sponsors include infamous moonbats Dick Durbin and Mazie Hirono in the Senate, Jerry Nadler and Ted Lieu in the House. However, some Republicans like John Kennedy are also on board.

The immediate effect will be to kill the meme, a political art form at which conservatives excel but liberals flounder, much like talk radio.

A Fight for the Future campaign explains what this will mean for you if the bill becomes law:

Have you ever shared a meme that you didn’t make? Or downloaded a photo you saw on social media? If Congress has its way, you could soon get slapped with a $15,000 fine by copyright trolls––with no chance of appeal––just for doing normal stuff on the Internet. These trolls buy up copyrights with the sole intent of sending out mass threats and lawsuits to harvest settlements.

Next, after they have purged graphics from every website with a smaller budget than CNN’s, they will go after extracted text, so as to wipe out blogs like this one completely.

A free and open Internet is too much of a threat to the Powers That Be to be allowed to exist indefinitely. Bureaucrats will regulate the life out of it, using copyrights and/or “hate speech” as the pretext. Soon we will be left with an Internet as bland, elitist, and 100% politically correct as PBS television.

On a tip from Bluto.

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