Good morning, John, I enjoyed your zombie-list very much, though it was woefully lacking in World War Z, which is the only piece of media that's given me nightmares since Akira. I don't know if you know this, but Dad took me to see Akira. When I was ten. In a dinner theater. And I will never forgive him.

There's a song (song starts playing) that plays during a particularly creepy part of the movie. I'm playing it for you right now but I'm not listening to it 'cause if I was listening to it I would look like this: (looks scared) In my opinion, that song is the creepiest piece of media that has ever been created.

John, here is what I just did: I just took a copyrighted work and then I commented on it. And that is what we call fair use. Because you can't just steal copyrighted stuff and it's like monetize it and be like "It's mine!". But you CAN comment on a copyrighted work and then that comment can include pieces of the copyrighted work.

Making that illegal would be a violation of free speech. But fair use is still a little bit fuzzy under the law so that people who created Akira could come in and challenge me on that.

So I do you think that American copyright law needs to be better. I love copyright law! We need copyright law! John, I don't want people to steal your books. But I also do not want Congress sticking its smarmy dirty little fingers into my internet!

I'm sorry Congress. I know you guys get a bad rep- But don't mess with my internet or I will come at you!!!

So, John, I have a top five list for you today. It's my top five reasons why we should not let congress regulate the internet.

One: I don't wanna go to jail! Also, I don't want 95% of people under thirty to be in jail. I just, I think it would be really bad for the American economy if we were all in jail.

Number two: one of the current pieces of legislation is called the
Preventing
Real
Online
Threats to
Economic
Creativity and
Theft of
Intellectual
Property
Act, and I feel like I should be doing this (gestures emphatically), like a politician. I don't know why they think that this is the hand motion they should always be using.

And the name of that Act makes me wanna co-sponsor a bill called the:
Anti
Contrived
Representations
Of
Name-
Yielding
Mnemonics
Seriously

Shut
Up
Congress

Act.

Three: Anti-piracy legislation stifles creativity, and it stifles economic growth. Machinima is a great example of a very large company doing very well in this economy that does things that are illegal, but basically no one cares that they're illegal because they're actually good for the copyright holders. If copyright holders are happy about copyright infringement, then our copyright legislation is clearly not too lax.

Four: we cannot blame a site for content that its users upload. Think about Tumblr, which is made wonderful by all of the GIFs of Abed saying whatever Abed said last night on Community. The PROTECT IP Act would make Tumblr responsible for keeping all of those off the site. And if it was found that they weren't doing everything they could to keep those GIFs off the site, they could be turned off. Like a flip of the switch. No more Tumblr.

And finally, number five, we really should not be putting the power into the hands of the corporations here. Under the Protect IP Act, a corporation could flag a Vlogbrothers video for being in violation of its copyright. The video would then be taken down, without any review by a person to figure out whether or not it has copyright infringement. We, the little content creators that we are, could then do nothing to get it back online. Because, apparently, the Motion Picture Association of America is now a law enforcement body.

The massive explosion of good, creative content and art and ideas that has come out of the internet is just, it's a good thing, and we should not be throwing a wrench into this process. And yes, technology is forcing this change, we are being forced to change, but we are going to have to change. Trying to lock it down by screwing up the only really good economic engine that we have right now is - just - GAAAHHH!

Everyone, check down in the description below, where I've written some stuff about how you can help keep the internet free. John, I will see you on - ahh, I don't know what day. What day is it? What day is it? Gah! I'll see you on Monday.

(sings) We are having a blizzard.