This SOPA thing

[alex_beecroft]

I’m not a political blogger, and politics in the USA often feel like something going on on the backside of the moon to me, with everyone speaking in acronyms and referring to things I’ve never heard of, and assuming things I would never in a million years assume (because things are different over here.)

So I’m not going to attempt to make any sort of coherent summary of this, except to say that there appears to be a bill going through the American government at the moment which will give the American government or Hollywood, or someone, power to take down anyone’s website without any kind of due process if that website ever embeds or links to any kind of copyrighted content at all. (Eg, if I talk about seeing The Avengers, and include a YouTube video of the trailer, or a still from the film, to illustrate the post, that will be illegal and will mean my entire site can be taken down. I can only get it back by suing somebody in America.)

That’s my understanding, anyway. This appears to me to be a very bad thing, so I have signed a petition to stop the bill from going through. Here are some links to people who do appear to thoroughly understand what is going on, and can hopefully explain it better than me.

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/01/18/why-sopa-and-pipa-and-other-anti-piracy-bullshit-measures-matter-to-writers/

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/013466.html

http://thehathorlegacy.com/stop-sopa-hollywoods-attempt-to-kidnap-what-google-has-rightfully-stolen/

http://thehathorlegacy.com/sopa-supply-and-demand-doesnt-work-anymore/

http://vimeo.com/31100268

http://sopablackout.org/learnmore/

Even if big corporations in the US can’t take down the sites of people in other countries (which I damn well hope they can’t) do we really want our friends in the US to be living under such a regime? I wouldn’t trust my government with the power to silence me at will, let alone some faceless unelected corporation.

It’s not too late to join the strike http://sopastrike.com/ but I’m not sure if I have the technical competence for that, so instead I’m passing on links and info, and suggesting that if you haven’t bothered reading about this yet, it might be a good time to start.

This is where I found the petition to sign http://americancensorship.org/ There is a “contact your senator” box for Americans and an “if you’re not from the US, sign here” box for everyone else.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

Comments

[sharpiefan]

It's not just personal sites. YouTube won't be allowed to host that clip of The Avengers or they'll risk getting sued themselves. Photobucket won't be allowed to host my banner of Sharpe - or anything that's not personal photos or videos.

So fanworks - art, icons, other graphics - will not have any sort of hosting available to them on American servers. Someone in Europe or Australasia or somewhere will put up a new version of YouTube and Photobucket, but American access (as far as I understand it) will be blocked.

DW and LJ won't be allowed to host communities or journals where people are putting up fanworks. I think that'll include fic too.

It's going to break the internet and fandom as we know them. And it is totally disgusting.

I've signed the petition. God only knows if Congress will take into account how many people wrldwide hate this thing, but on another site I'm on where this has been discussed, someone posted this: Yeaaaah I'm in Pennsylvania and wrote to Bob Casey, the e-mail I got back basically said he was voting for it regardless of what people wanted.

Which is totally disgusting. In a democratic country, politicians are voted into power to be a voice for their constituents. Supposedly.

I wish that of all the big sites that've blacked out in support, Photobucket and YouTube had joined in, and Facebook and Twitter. (The latter would affect people who've never even heard of SOPA/PIPA and/or don't realise it'd affect them too, so it'd kick up a huge storm!)

And I'm preaching to the converted now. Sorry! *hugs*

[sharpiefan]

Also. This link's to a list of those sites that are going to be blacked out today in protest over SOPA/PIPA: http://mashable.com/2012/01/17/sopa-companies-dark-list/

[alex_beecroft]

Dreamwidth was down for about 5 minutes, wasn't it? I tried to get in earlier to answer your comments and got the "we are protesting" screen, but then it came back.

[sharpiefan]

There's a dw_news post that's just gone up about it. They thought about blacking out, apparently, but decided that DW is a place where people are going to speak out and decided not to silence them.

(Nice breeches in that icon. Yum!)

[alex_beecroft]

Yes, it seemed a bit counterproductive to black out altogether, though I should have realized that the blackout screen they used would redirect people to the protest. If there's a next time, I'll join in too.

Lord Admiral Rodney thanks you kindly :)

[alex_beecroft]

Yes, YouTube would be the first against the wall, which is an enormous shame, although my daughters are also bewailing the fact that Tumblr would probably be wiped out too (along with all fanfiction sites.) After that, I'm not sure I'd want to go on the internet at all. On the plus side, I'd be lots more productive if I couldn't hang around reading fanfic and watching the fanvids on YouTube, but all that work, all that creativity, lost just like that. It doesn't bear thinking about.

Well, I've signed too, which appears to be all I can do, other than investigating how hard it would be to change my site to a co.uk instead of a .com There does at least seem to be some interest and indignity building up now, which is something at least. Fingers crossed!

[zeborah]

Even if big corporations in the US can’t take down the sites of people in other countries

If it's registered at a US domain (so, .org, .com) then I believe they could take it down. If it's registered overseas (.uk, .nz, etc) then they could merely break the domain linkage on US ISPs (the way the thing.co.uk resolves to the set of numbers which is its actual address), make US search engines remove it from their search results, and block any US income going to it such as Google ads etc. So not a whole lot better.

And note that this could apply to any site which hosts material that breaks US copyright law (even if it's in the public domain in your own country) and which is "US-directed" ie doesn't explicitly prevent USans from accessing it. So, this could apply to libraries and non-US Gutenberg projects and all sorts of other honourable sites.

[alex_beecroft]

Oh, that makes sense! I have a UK host, but am registered as a .com, so I'd have to go and become a .co.uk before I was completely independent. It wouldn't be a disaster for me if my site were to become invisible in the US, but I can certainly see how it would be for people who traded on a regular basis with the US, or relied on pay per click adverts or whatever.

That's more of a side issue, just from my own personal pov, to the main problem - which is the much more serious problem of essentially destroying the fan community. And bigger than that, the potential use as a way to stop free speech. I'd be against it for those two reasons even if it did nothing against me personally at all.

[sharpiefan]

There are UK sites that are .org; it's not solely a US suffix.

It is completely, completely immoral and wrong. There are better ways to combat piracy and stuff online than by dictating what content users can and cannot access in this way.

YouTube will go straight down the pan. Photobucket may not do so right away. IMDb... dunno.

If Facebook goes down - there are people on there who don't understand why they can't post pictures of themselves breastfeeding, for God's sake, because they don't know that it's a US site and has to obey US laws. How are they going to react?!

And who draws the line on what's illegal and what's not? Would hand-drawn artwork break the law? And names aren't copyrighted, nor are titles. So some forms of fanfic ought to slip through the net.

And what if the fic's based on something that's written in the UK by a UK citizen, published in the UK? Or is in the public domain?

This is such a mess, and I am sick that US politicians think it is acceptable to ruin things for a huge chunk of the world's population.

Oops. I'll get off my high horse and stop preaching to the converted. Again.

[zeborah]

There are UK sites that are .org; it's not solely a US suffix.

Sure: I've got a .com myself and I'm a New Zealander. But I'm pretty sure that because it's a .com, that address is ultimately under the control of a company which would be subject to US laws, so under this Act they'd be able to break the address, at least.

[alex_beecroft]

It is completely wrong. Yes, this does make it much easier to take down pirate sites, but that's because it makes it much easier to take down any site at all with no due process and no comeback.

Presumably, if they did do this, lots of enterprising people in other countries would install big servers and set up equivalents to the sites that were lost, and America would become a kind of China - largely irrelevant to the global internet. But that would be a shame both for the USA and for us, and I wouldn't want to see it happen, partly from a "that would put me out of contact with all my friends in America" POV, and partly from a "don't lets allow the biggest country in the free world to become a totalitarian regime, because that's no good for anyone," POV.

[darkemeralds]

It sounds like you have the situation extremely well covered, but I'll pass this along anyway, because I found it succinct and clear: a TED talk by Clay Shirky (technology writer) filmed yesterday, which deconstructs SOPA/PIPA and makes a cogent case for the urgency of the fight, in about ten minutes:

http://www.ted.com/talks/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html

[alex_beecroft]

Oh, thanks for that! He does make a very elegant case. I don't think I'd like to go back to the days when there was no LJ, no DW, no FF.net, no YouTube and no Tumblr. I vaguely remember fandom when it was on Yahoo Groups, but I presume they would be vulnerable too. It would get rid of pretty much everything I use the internet for. I don't support the idea of downloading copyrighted content in whole without paying for it, but I do support the idea of being able to talk about it, and make works based on it and share them.