For the entire day today, you won’t be able to see our logo on the Riskalyze.com web site. It’s obscured by a black bar that looks like this.

We’re joining a group of Internet companies and organizations to oppose two bills winding their way through Congress, known as SOPA and Protect-IP. Bankrolled by lobbyists for big media companies, these pieces of legislation want to make it possible for the federal government to block access to web sites at the DNS level of the Internet.

These are the same tactics that China, Iran and Syria use to suppress the freedom of their citizens. I don’t care how good the reason might be – this is a line the United States should never cross.

Right now, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act offers startups like Riskalyze “safe harbor” protections. Let’s say that one of our users upload a copyrighted image as their profile photo (silly, but certainly possible). A big media company could send us a letter, and we wouldn’t have liability as long as we removed the copyrighted material.

Under this new law, big media companies can go after any site hosting images, video, sound or even links that appear to violate copyright – and get them blocked at the DNS level. Any sites designed to allow for self-expression, like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or YouTube, are at risk.

Putting huge liabilities on the technology startups driving all of the net job creation in this country over the last few years is the last thing we need to do. I hope you’ll get involved and make sure Congress knows that the big media lobbyists can’t have their way.

You can learn more about these bills from this AmericanCensorship.org info graphic, and send a free letter to your Congressional representative here.