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.” The Act’s authors want to raise the bar for what’s considered a copyright violation — a minimum of 40 percent of copyrighted content would be required to consider a derivative work like a mashup illegal — and abolish liability for any upload that could reasonably be assumed to fall under fair use. Obviously, this is just the beginning of a mind-bogglingly huge project, but even if it doesn’t go anywhere it’s great to see people actually rolling their sleeves up and putting some work in, and it’s a logical next step after asking for a halt on new IP legislation.