Resist US attempts to police Internet globally

Intellectual property rights in Tanzania are a fiction. If we’re frank about it, the moral background and capitalist thirst to support them simply don’t exist. Those of us working in creative industries tend to care a little more about them, but that’s it.

Intellectual property rights demand a worldview that privileges the individual and rewards innovation with riches, a philosophy that hasn’t made all that much headway into our lifestyle quite yet.

Innovation is bountiful, sure, but privatising the benefits of said innovation is a war of attrition that you will lose in Tanzania.

My biggest fear is that SOPA could amputate the Internet, thereby restricting the best mechanism humankind has come up with yet for sharing knowledge, cutting off flows of information that Tanzanians should be benefiting from as much as possible.

Also, it is an alarmingly imperious Bill. If the land of the not-so-free is keen to start policing the Internet just because Big Business told them to, who is to say that other governments won’t start getting ideas?

SOPA would also be useful in monitoring activists and dissidents around the world. Even as far away as a sleepy-backwater economy like Tanzania, which frankly needs to ignore as much intellectual property rights bullying as possible to survive.