We are all opposed to the egregious Stop Online Piracy Act, right? We all want me to be able to do what I did in the previous post, for example? I included in my post a small quote from a freely available online publication, linked to it, and engaged in an analysis of the quote. Does anybody see any problem with me doing this? Is anybody morally opposed? If not:
Let’s stop SOPA (and PIPA, which is its name in the Senate.) Our Federal government is planning to sink another huge amount of taxpayers’ money to persecute independent bloggers, to thwart our online searches and to police out Internet activities in order to serve the needs of the money-hungry entertainment industry. Do you want this to happen? Do you need the government to protect you from whatever it is you do online? Do you welcome the idea of the government messing with your online experiences? Do you want your screen to look like this:
Do you?
If not, join the protest here.
Clarissa's Blog 
Signed the petition and called Inouye, Akaka, Hirono, and Hanabusa (My Hawaii senators and reps) over this. They must be quite sick of me by now, I end up contacting them a lot, but at least I never drop into their Honolulu offices for a courtesy call anymore. 🙂
Long live a free and open internet. I won’t let the web be destroyed by legislation penned by people who have no understanding of it.
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People who are constantly in touch with their elected representatives are the ones who act in a truly responsible way as citizens. I admire you for being so politically active!
I have quite recently observed the efforts of a friend who discovered a piece of really nasty legislation that was being snuck by us in our state. She mobilized a lot of people to protest. And you know what? It didn’t pass.
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People underestimate the power of getting in touch with your local politicians. It’s the primary reason I want to learn French, so I can constantly remind the ones here what this voting Canadian believes, in both official languages. 🙂
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Wikipedia is doing a brilliant job, too!
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If SOPA passes, such innocent things as Sunday Link Encyclopedia will have to go, too. And a blog can be closed down even if a commenter chooses to leave a link. Which means that all comments will have to be strictly moderated. Just imagine what that will do for blog discussions.
I get many comments and it makes me happy to have many people participate in discussions. However, I can’t imagine having to vet every single comment. I simply don’t have the time for that.
Who is being protected here and from what, exactly?
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Nothing like deliberate misunderstanding to get the idiot masses all riled up.
Your blog has nothing to fear. And it if it kills Wikipedia, all the better.
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What’s wrong with Wikipedia all of a sudden?
I though you were against governmental intrusion into all areas of our lives, Patrick. Why are you suddenly all for paternalistic governments babying us all over the place?
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Especially when the people who would, theoretically, benefit most from SOPA and PIPA, small internet business owners (like Randall Munroe) and artists (like Neil Gaiman) have come out thunderously against both of them.
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I’m hash on Wikipedia because the users are idiots, not Wikipedia itself. Too many common folks think that Wikipedia is the be-all and end all of research. If it’s on Wiki, it must be right. Especially teachers who fail students because their citations came from real books and official sites rather than Wikipedia.
As far as gov’t intrusion, I’m for a balance between individual freedom and the rule of law. As I said, your blog is safe – unless you intend to start stealing from artists. And then ignoring their requests to stop stealing from them. Linking to a source is not stealing – it’s creating traffic to the source. I’ve seen nothing convincing that the proposed legislation would have any effect on a bloggers ability to link to sources. That’s just bone-headed anarchist rhetoric.
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Idiots will find ways to be idiotic with or without Wikipedia.
“Especially teachers who fail students because their citations came from real books and official sites rather than Wikipedia.”
– Sounds like an urban myth.
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Not an urban myth. First hand knowledge. Our exchange student was failed on a paper about the Governor General of Canada because Wikipedia wasn’t her SOLE SOURCE – written in red ink on the returned paper. God forbid she actually go to the Government of Canada Website and Library books for sources. Teacher was just too damn lazy.
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That sounds like a problem with the teacher and the administration, not Wikipedia.
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Yes, because there is to fear big companies coming in, bleeding the internet dry and then marketing it off in a way that makes it as bland, dull and unentertaining as television.
Any attempt by a government to censor anything, even to the smallest extent must be stopped I’m afraid.
If there was a Murdoch backed venture to censor the press, people (including you) would be up in arms. Because the press is so homogeneous that it isn’t worth attacking, they have gone after the internet, and a legitimate attempts to defend it is labelled as scaremongering.
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Goddamn it, my grammar is awful. I guess that’s what happens when one types too fast. I apologise.
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Just contacted my Senators. Unfortunately both senators from New York support this travesty of a law. I’ll vote against them if they continue their support.
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Am I cynical to suspect that these senators are lying all snuggled in somebody’s pocket?
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YES to every word of this comment. This is happening precisely because so many people are turning away from the newspapers and television in search of creative, honest, interesting content online. The entertainment industry wants to herd people back to its products by force through destroying any other option.
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Many of them get a lot of money from media companies. Both of my senators get a lot of money from media special interests and the main asshole behind SOPA in congress, Lamar Smith, gets lots of money from them also. As a matter of fact, they are his number one contributors.
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00001811
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Nothing to fear? You are clueless. Media companies have been suing people left and right. They have even sued people for using copy righted material they did not even own.
Get a clue.
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University Diaries is a blog written by a college prof. A lovely blog. The author does the same things I do here. Posts lots of interesting links, etc. She was sued and almost driven out of blogging for copyright violations: “”I turned out to be one of hundreds of American bloggers carpet-bombed by Righthaven,” Margaret Soltan, an English professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., recalled in a new blog post.
Righthaven since March 2010 has filed 274 lawsuits against website operators, bloggers and message-board posters alleging online infringements of material from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Denver Post.
Before its litigation campaign ran into trouble with rulings against its standing to sue; and fair-use losses in three cases; many defendants, like Soltan, had settled under undisclosed terms.
Soltan, who has a noncommercial blog called “University Diaries” about American university life, was sued last year over material from a Review-Journal story she had posted.
At issue was an R-J story about a UNLV assistant football coach who had been charged with trespassing and prohibited use of weapons in Colorado.
At the time, Soltan said she did not post the story at issue, but rather quoted some paragraphs from it and posted them with a link to the original story. . . Soltan this weekend expressed concern for other defendants including retirees, veterans and people with disabilities whose “lives have been nightmarish, filled with fear that they will lose everything they own because they quoted a few lines from a newspaper story.””
http://www.vegasinc.com/news/2011/jul/04/former-defendant-recalls-righthaven-copyright-orde/
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Copyright laws are important. When individuals and groups infringe copyright they should be prosecuted.
If one does not subscribe to that, then one does not subscribe to property rights. And without property rights, capitalism cannot thrive.
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Do you not realize that the impact that SOPA/PIPA would have on piracy would be bloody negligible compared to the amount of harm it would do to legitimate internet services, internet small business owners, artists, and bloggers? A free and open internet has revolutionized the way artists and entrepreneurs interact with their fans and customers, and SOPA/PIPA would completely destroy that.
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Nobody has been able to make a convincing argument that this legislation will do anything to prevent illegal downloading of content. It will, however, punish blogs like mine. And I’ve never downloaded an illegal copy of a movie or a song in my life. Why should I be punished? Who is hurt if I link to your content and you link to mine? Why should these daily online interactions be policed?
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I’m coming up with a new internet law, akin to Godwin’s Law or Poe’s Law: The less a person understands the long-term impact something has on other people’s lives, the more likely they are to be very vocal about it and dismissive of people who correct them.
I need a name for it. So far the only things I can think of is the “Hey you kids get off my lawn!” Law or “SOPA’s Law”, and those are not catchy at all.
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Reddit’s Law.
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Reddit’s Law makes total sense. 🙂
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Nobody is claiming anything contrary to that, I understand that filmmakers, songwriters, authors etc. are getting ripped off by internet piracy and I understand that something mus be done about it.
Putting even more power in the hands of the few and censoring large portions of the entire internet is not a reasonable and rational answer, it is a slippery slope to authoritarianism.
The presumption that any of this would work anyway is ignorant and short sighted.
The Iranian Government, despite their best efforts, can’t stop ‘subversive’ material appearing on the internet. Despite the best efforts of all the governments in the world, we can’t irradiate the evils of child pornography from the internet. The Egyptian Government couldn’t stop Twitter being used to organise protests last spring, despite their best efforts. And despite the best efforts of the people backing this bill, they will be unable to end copyright theft entirely.
The Internet is too big and too difficult to fully regulate in the way the American bills want to. If people want to access something desperately enough, they will find a way to do it: be it pro-homosexuality articles in Iran, Child pornography anywhere in the world, or illegal music downloads in America. If you know where to look on the internet, you’ll find what you want in the end, this bill will do nothing to change that. Instead, it will ruin a very real beacon of free speech and access to information for the technologically illiterate.
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“If people want to access something desperately enough”
they go to Reddit and 4chan.
[Off topic but just got a bit of a shock in my local news feed and it’s vaguely relevant to this point about Iran and oppressive horrors so if you don’t want to feel miserable and terrified today do yourself a favor and do not google the name Gelareh Bagherzadeh.]
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Now this is a good argument – a recognition that something must be done, but this ain’t it.
So – how do we protect creative material?
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“So – how do we protect creative material?”
– To be honest, I think that the most productive thing to do is to recognize that this ship has sailed a while ago and we need to learn to adapt to a new reality. Experience shows that less strict copyright laws actually boost sales. In countries where copyright is almost non-existent one has a much greater chance to become extremely rich and famous on the strength of one’s talent.
I can explain how this works, if people are interested.
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If SOPA was passed, 4chan and reddit would not be able to survive. Every fourm or site with a comments section in the whole world would have to hire moderators to check comments before they’re pulished just so that they don’t link to sites with copyrighted material, or they would get taken offline.
Sites like 4Chan, and like this one, would not be able to exist at all. And, I don’t wish to sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but that is the entire point of the Act. Because then the media corporations that ruled the world for 50-100 years before the advent of the internet can reclaim all that lost ground when their rival sites become financially crippled, and we can be subjected to the same dreary rubbish that we get on television.
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“Sites like 4Chan, and like this one, would not be able to exist at all. And, I don’t wish to sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but that is the entire point of the Act. Because then the media corporations that ruled the world for 50-100 years before the advent of the internet can reclaim all that lost ground when their rival sites become financially crippled, and we can be subjected to the same dreary rubbish that we get on television.”
– I think you are absolutely right.
“Every fourm or site with a comments section in the whole world would have to hire moderators to check comments before they’re pulished just so that they don’t link to sites with copyrighted material, or they would get taken offline.”
– Just imagine how easy it will be for anybody to get a blog banned just by publishing comments containing unmarked quotes. Unless the site’s owner googles every comment to see if it contains information published somewhere in a copyrighted form, this will be done very easily.
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David Bowie and Henry Rollins both agree with that. Rollins even said once in an interview/routine, “Honestly, I would rather get heard than get paid.”
And more artists should go the route that Louis CK did; no record company, no sweetheart deals, no nothing, and he earned over a million dollars. Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails released “With Teeth” and Radiohead released In Rainbows as digital self-downloads where you paid anything from a penny to whatever you desired, and they made fortunes off of it too. The world of distributing creative works is changing, and the artists like it, but the execs don’t.
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With the Sovereign of the Guild of Calamitous Intent and the huge dude from Black Flag on our side we can’t possibly lose.
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But it should be my choice to distribute my creative works in a free fashion or not. They shouldn’t be stolen from me. Deeming the internet a free for all because you can is akin to deeming my front door irrelevant because you have a lock pick. Criminal behaviour is criminal behaviour, and ought to be treated as such.
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It absolutely is your choice. You’ll just make more money and get more exposure if you keep up with the times and realize the old methods of distribution are dead. It’s your choice absolutely to either maximize your profits or hurt them, and my choice as a consumer to show which method I am going to partake in from now on. 🙂
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