(Not So) Final Thoughts
Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 7:39AM | Written by: AlienCG It is now January 19th. Wikipedia is back in view, Reddit, Wordpress, Google and all of the other sites who "blacked out" yesterday are now back to normal. But this issue is not done by long shot. As you will find out at the end of this post, there is still a lifetime of work to be done. The controversial bills that were being protested are not the end of the line, nor were they the beginning. SOPA and PIPA were just the continuation in the chain of bills drafted by the entertainment industry to stop any and all sharing of any of their stuff for any reason. Currently, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) allows anybody to share anything as long as the person sharing is not making money. This is called Fair-Use. The entertainment industry seek to remove that. If, for example, I post a photo and somebody wants to critique it, he or she can copy the photo, repost it in whole or in part, with attribution, and mark it and say anything about it. I have no legal recourse because it's fair-use. This would be taken away under SOPA and/or PIPA. I can't explain all of it myself, so I will let Clay Shirky, writer and teacher, explain it. It may not appear below if this legislation passes, so you will have to go to the TED website and look for Clay Shirky talking about SOPA and PIPA. I wouldn't even be able to link to the video, let alone embed it.
As a bonus, I have also included the Khan Academy explanation of these two bills.
Keep our Internet free. Thank you.
Reader Comments (3)
Keep our Internet free. I second that.
I know I can always find the scoop here on what is or isn't the truth... or at least a path to it.
While I do sympathize with entertainment folk about big time pirating of their income sources, I think that this is NOT ok. Thanks for the links. I need to follow this closely. No censorship! No loss of our voice. Not acceptable. And I think thats what it boils down to. We don't want to open up that door.
Thank you for posting the Clay Shirky video. He explained a lot!
PS: Unrelated to this post, I really like your new blog layout!