Sunday, June 28, 2009

Authors and Shareholders Against Pirates

This blog is designed to reach as many authors in America as possible. My goal is to get a shareholder motion onto the ballots of every AGM of every company on the NYSE or NASDAQ.

The motion would be a shareholder resolution that the company will not host torrents of copyrighted works, or any activity involving the illegal file sharing of works of fiction (or the posting of lists of novels that are available for sharing), or works of non-fiction that are copyrighted, or copyrighted images.

Also, (maybe a second motion) that the company will not give comfort and financial support to file sharing sites by advertising on them.

What we need is a voting block, at least one author in the vicinity of the AGMs who is willing to attend, speak, and vote proxies.

More interesting is the dilemma companies would face with our shareholder motion on their proxy forms. Will the recommend a vote against?

How would that look?
Presumably, their recommendation would be a matter of public record, and we could blog about it?

In any case, if enough shareholders proposed our motions, every company in America would be sending every shareholder our motion and thereby presenting our case and publicizing our issue with copyright infringement... and as far as I can see, it would be free to us.

All we have to do is find authors who own stock or shares, or who can influence family members who do. I think we start with one author (at least) from every publishing house in America.

Please join me.

Comment if you wish to join this blog.

Rowena Cherry