Funny how when you censor a post like this one, you miss out on a lot.
Essentially, what the SOPA/PIPA (Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, respectively) supporters propose is the strict policing of any and all potential copyright infringement on the Internet. In theory, doesn't it sound like a great idea?
Let's say you're a PC game company with the Latest and Greatest Title Ever. You sell Latest and Greatest Title Ever for $20. One of your ardent fans buys said Title for $20 and sneaks it onto some random filesharing site. Within two days, it has 10,000 downloads and you're out $200,000 that those people could have and should have paid you upfront. Yeah, no, I get that. SOPA wants to make sure that doesn't happen, and that's not at all a bad thing to fight for.
But that's only a tenth of the story. Do you honestly think that's where the legislation is content to stop? They don't make these things hundreds of pages for nothing.
Let's change territories. Some Australian-accented guy wants to stitch together a "Let's Play"-style walkthrough of Latest and Greatest Title Ever. Well he can't now; for that matter, he shouldn't even be allowed to in the first place, as it's not part of his intellectual property anyway; and, by making it available for anyone else to view, someone like me could vicariously enjoy Amnesia: The Dark Descent without ever having to purchase it. I could watch it for hours at a time, and at the end of a marathon decide "you know what, I should go buy this game right now."
Under SOPA, say goodbye to all your favorite AMVs on Vimeo and YouTube, all your favorite stories on fanfiction.net, all your DeviantArt deviousness, and all your nauseating Tumblr GIFs. Say goodbye to the phenomenon of "fandom" as you so enjoy it. Say goodbye to "transcending pixels."
Say goodbye to building communities and promoting viral campaigns for all your movies, TV shows, music, books, brands, and yes, video games.
Say goodbye to message boards, Wikipedia, Facebook, libraries, entire search engines. If they're even so much as linking to content that links to content containing copyrighted material, screw them.
Politicians, well-meaning perhaps, but all the same misinformed and misunderstanding, will see the Internet in black and white. Every piece of information or content is either naughty or nice. Just because some things are wrong doesn't mean some things aren't perfectly right and acceptable.
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[ERROR: COPYRIGHTED MEME IMAGE]
There's gotta be another way to protect copyrighted information without causing the end of the Internet as we know it.
No, I don't feel fine. (Ironically, I've supported the Google-Big-Brother argument at times, but I still signed their petition.)
[The uncensored version of this post will appear tomorrow. Funny how when you censor a post like this one, you miss out on a lot.]
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