If you vote against Protect-IP, we will vote for YOU

As more and more teenagers like myself reach voting age full of piss and vinegar, ready to cast our first votes, young voters are becoming increasingly well-steeped in digital culture, and more and more, the realities of our online lives will shape political opinion.

I am an example of an artist from the digital generation. I was on the internet using my little hands to type words to people all around the globe before I really knew how to spell any of them. My parents homeschooled me, and I found the classroom of my dreams when I stepped through a digital portal to places like forums, irc channels, and wikis in the programming, digital graphics, and video game development worlds.

I mingled with professionals in the field, got jobs, and participated in a community that, over the span of my education, became a multi billion dollar industry. I was photoshopping the watermarks off of google image search results before I even knew what copyright law was, and using whatever music I could find to accompany my visual productions because I knew that no one cared and everyone else was doing it too.

As I grew older, the iphone and android were released along with additional advancements in web-based technology, and I watched as my online friends, with who I shared knowledge and digital resources daily, became superstars in a booming industry. I realized that the kind of hive-mind, greater-good sharing that had been a fact of life for me and my then-microcosmic community, that had been labeled copyright infringement, was really not a crime, and didn't have to be criminalized for media industry to succeed.

In fact, I would say that if such laws had been enforced effectively, the mobile entertainment industry that I participated in the birth of might not be as successful and promising as it is today.

Protect-IP is all about increasing copyright enforcement, and it directly or indirectly targets many of the venues in which new digital industries are growing every year.

A vote for Protect-IP is a vote against small businesses, it is a vote to criminalize a generation, and a vote for the sole benefit of large media corporations that are past their prime and do not contribute anything to creative industry any more.