= May First/People Link Statement for the AMC 2009 Conference =

We have all gathered because we believe in alternative media, its power and potential and its importance in the struggles of our peoples for a better world. We are convinced that it is not only better, more complete and more accurate than mainstream media but that the role it plays, the way it is developed and delivered and the access people have to developing and delivering it make it completely different from mainstream media.

And we are here to protect and enhance that difference.

But protecting that difference goes wider than the content of the media itself. As the potential for collaborative work and greater demands for alternative distribution broaden, we are finding ourselves face to face with an enormous challenge and a politically critical decision.

Like all work, alternative media contributes to and supports the work of others. The media produced by people here advances the software, websites and systems constructed to distribute it. And it is there that a choice is made.

Most of our community is reliant on proprietary distribution systems -- YouTube, Google and others -- that are owned by large companies whose goal is to control communications as a market and to control expression as a product much the same way the mainstream media sells eyeballs to advertisers. With these systems, we give up some of our rights to our own media and we also support systems that aren't open, that are controlled by companies and that can and frequently do engage in censorship and content control without our consent.

There is nothing more poisonous than this situation and there is an alternative.