The mission of WordPress.com is to democratize publishing. We’re inspired every day by the ways creators use our platform to bring their voices to the world. Unfortunately, we also see many cases of censorship aimed at WordPress.com authors and users.

One area where we’ve seen a number of problems is the censoring of criticism through abuse of copyright law. Two recentcases of abuse really caught our attention and made us think that we needed to take action to fight back on behalf of our users and everyone who believes in the internet’s promise for free expression.

Censorship by DMCA

A common form of censorship by copyright stems from improper use of legal creations called DMCA takedown notices. The DMCA stands for the “Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” which is a US federal law that created a system for protecting copyrights online. The DMCA system works pretty well, but has a…

This video is called Rababa poem / song Jordanian Bedouin traditional music.

From Associated Press:

Syria roadside bomb wounds 2 Jordanian writers

By ALBERT AJI and RYAN LUCAS

— Nov. 21, 2013 10:01 AM EST

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — A bomb exploded Thursday near a bus carrying a group of Jordanian writers who met with senior Syrian government leaders on an official visit, wounding five of them, one of the delegates said.

The Syrian state news agency SANA said two Jordanians were wounded. But the Jordanians said five of them were wounded by the late afternoon explosion in Daraa province, 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of the Jordanian border.

“It was tumultuous. We heard a big boom and we were hit with shrapnel,” said Hussein Mutawee, one of the wounded writers.

He said the 20-member delegation from the Jordanian Writers Syndicate was in Syria for four days, meeting with…

For the past few years, Senator Harry Reid has been reluctant to use the “Nuclear Option” to break  the current Senate “filibuster” rules  and return the filibuster back to a “simple majority” rule.  Kudos to Sen. Reid.

Daily Kos

Kaboom! Republicans dared Harry Reid to do it, and he just did, finally. The Senate has voted to change the filibuster rules, 52-48. Democrats Carl Levin, Joe Manchin, Mark Pryor voted against changing the rule.

The new rule that will allow just a simple majority vote for all nominees except for the Supreme Court. For the remainder of this Congress, President Obama’s nominees will only need 51 votes to be appointed. What that means immediately is that, while the Republicans continue to play games to delay action on the Defense Authorization, the nominations of Patricia Millett, Nina Pillard, and Roberts Wilkins to the D.C. Circuit can move forward. So can the…

A child crawls on the mud strewn ground, his ribs jutting out in sharp relief, distorting the light of the harsh Somalian sun that beats down, parching the land dry; he looks around for his mother. There she comes, carrying a tiny package in her burnt brown hands, to lift up her child; he weighs less than a bird now, and he won’t eat. She balls up grains of rice, pushes them against his lips, and he tries, then fails. In a land where twelve million lay starving, what’s one child? How much difference does one tiny beating heart make? The answer is: all the difference in the world.

A narrow alleyway in Libya, the pavement cracked and threaded, broken by the combat boots that have marched over it. A terrified teenager stands hidden, shadowed in the ruins of a crumbling wall, watching the trigger being pulled. They have guns…

The day of remembrance on Vukovar as victim – 18 November – yesterday – saw an amazing display of determination to pursue with protecting the rights of victims of war crimes (the murdered and killed, the raped, the wounded, the disabled, the distraught, the still suffering masses from the horrors of Serb aggression in 1991) and their deserved memory. It also saw a shameful display of cowardice and hypocrisy by the Zoran Milanovic led Government and the President, Ivo Josipovic.

Yesterday, almost 100,000 people marched through the streets of Vukovar towards the Memorial Cemetery – led by multitudes of war veterans from all over Croatia, the members and activists for Vukovar as special place of piety (Committee for the defense of Croatian Vukovar), those who have been protesting against Serbian Cyrillic script of public signs for months, those who have been protesting against the lack of prosecutions for war crime…