Picture: Isaac Mao

Activists advocating an open Internet and worried that the Senate could fast-track a controversial online intellectual property protection bill are coalescing on the web and getting together to set up meetings with their members of Congress and staffers in states across the U.S. to express their concerns with the legislation.

The meetings are taking place over the next couple of weeks either with congressional staffers, or at town hall meetings that the activists plan on attending. They’re going armed with talking points prepared by digital rights group Public Knowledge, which ask the members of congress to vote no on the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT IP, or “PIPA.”)

“SOPA really angers people,” says 31-year-old Tiffiniy Cheng, director for the Media Democracy Fund‘s Center for Rights, which is the non-profit behind Americancensorship.org, where the organizing among the grassroots opponents of the legislation is going on. Cheng and her colleagues have been working with Public Knowledge, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the the Mozilla Foundation to gin up public attention to the measure. The senate could vote as soon as January 24, a day after it returns from recess, to approve it. Continue reading →