Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, a 2012 Libertarian presidential candidate, slammed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) Wednesday. “We want the government to keep its hands off the Internet,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a blog post on his official campaign website.
“While the issues are complex, the net result of these proposed laws would be to grant the government the right to essentially shut down websites which carry copyrighted or otherwise ‘protected’ material, such as songs, movies, books without the permission of the owners of that material,” Mr. Johnson said in a press statement.
Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and a Libertarian party candidate in 1988, also slammed SOPA and the Protect Internet Privacy Act (PIPA) Wednesday. “My campaign, and the entire freedom movement, would not be as strong as they are today without a free Internet. That’s just one of the reasons why the establishment hopes to censor it with SOPA and PIPA,” Mr. Paul wrote on his Facebook page.
Mr. Johnson also encouraged his friends on Google plus to sign Google’s “End Piracy, Not Liberty” petition. “There is no need to make American social networks, blogs and search engines censor the internet or undermine the existing laws that have enabled the Web to thrive, creating millions of U.S. jobs,” the”End Piracy, Not Liberty” petition read.
“Kudos to Wikipedia and the thousands of the other sites who took action to let people know of these threats to Internet freedom, the flow of information, and the free market,” Mr. Johnson professed.
“As I have said, there are NO problems with the Internet that we want the government to try to fix!,” Mr. Johnson added.
After the SOPA blackout, a day in which major Internet companies protested SOPA and PIPA, Mr. Johnson tweeted “SOPA & PIPA aren’t dead, but they are in serious pain – thank to a few million freedom-loving American who get it.”
