Sharing fannish enthusiasm!

Since I can’t reblog my own post from November, I’m reposting it (with some updates) instead:

PLEASE REBLOG.

You may’ve seen Google, Wikipedia (source of the above image), John Scalzi’s site, Reddit, boing boing, Creative Commons and other sites/groups supporting a “blackout” of their own sites today, to stop the “Stop Internet Piracy Act” and “Protect Intellectual Property Act”, neither of which do anything of the sort. 

In fact, the  The “Stop Internet Piracy Act” is written in such a way that it gives any owner of any copyright, trademark right, right of publicity or other intellectual property rights the ability to shut down a site’s ability to accept donations made via credit card companies, PayPal or Amazon, or bar a site from hosting Google or Groupon ads or being part of the WBShop or Amazon Affiliate programs just because they think that one icon, one User Profile, one piece of fanart, one fanvid or one fanfic infringes on their content - regardless of whether that story, icon, vid or art is transformative, or created pursuant to fair use. 

“Fair use is a lawful use of copyright.”

That’s what the Northern District of California said in Lenz v. Universal Music back in 2008. So much of what we as fans do on the internet - on fandom-specific sites and on the wider internet - is fair use, but there’s no Fair Use provision in SOPA. 

“Think about this for a second: think how many bogus DMCA takedown notices are sent by copyright holders to take down content they don’t like,” writes TechDirt’s Mike Masnick. “With this new bill, should it become law, those same copyright holders will be able to cut off advertising and payment processing to such sites. Without court review.”

If a site can’t accept donations via PayPal, or payments from AmEx or MasterCard or GooglePayments or Amazon, no matter how large they are, they won’t be able to keep the site online. If SOPA passes, and one copyright-holder who doesn’t agree with the law of Fair Use complains to PayPal or Google or Amazon, we may lose the ability to accept donations or be paid by users like you. 

YouTube hosts fanvids, parodies and reviews, Tumblr and LiveJournal host every type of content that can be created, and Google links to everything. One person can choose to abuse the provisions of SOPA and damage each of those sites for everyone - or the sites themselves may curtail certain services, or limit what they allow people to share, discuss and distribute. 

That’s not an Internet that any of us would recognize. 

If you live in the US, please contact your Senator and your Representative, or click here to visit the EFF’s website and have an email automatically sent to your representative. If you don’t live in the US, please make sure your friends who do are aware of what this bill says and what it could do. 

MarkReads has some links here and another roundup of info here. Check out reddit.com for more information, and view their video about SOPA and PIPA’s destructive capabilities here. Be amused, and be scared, by The Oatmeal’s explanation of what could happen to humorists, parodists, creative mash-up artists, social media users, rebloggers and creative fandomers. 

The worst part of SOPA and PIPA is that the worst case scenarios are extremely likely, plausible and conceivable. 

The good news is, the White House has threatened a veto of the bills as they were last week, and the House has put off votes for the immediate future, because we on the internet - we content creators and we content distributors and we content users - have said no, this proposed law is bad and will destroy something we need, use and love. 

We can’t sit down now. 

Check the sites out and do what you can to stop SOPA and PIPA. 

This is a follow-up to my earlier post about the SOPA bill; and it’s crossposted from my LJ. There’s an interesting look at the law on Time Magazine’s Techland, which includes this quote:

On the margin…DNS filtering will no doubt reduce piracy. But what we have to ask ourselves is, at what cost? And that cost is legitimizing government blacklists of forbidden information… The result could be a virtually broken Internet where some sites exist for half the world and not for the other. The alternative is to leave the DNS alone and focus (as the bills also do) on going after the cash flow of rogue websites. As frustrating as it must be for the content owners who are getting ripped off, there are some cures worse than the disease.

The thing is, they’re ignoring the impact that the law would have on sites that host discussions, reviews, parodies, Fair Use-works, fan creativity, photographs, and more. The revenue streams of rogue websites? SOPA says that a site that hosts a Fair Use-protected fanwork is the same as a site that hosts a rip of a Blu-Ray film and all its extras.

It’s not.

I haven’t seen much discussion of the specific impact that SOPA could make on fansites of all types - sports, books, films, niche groups. Look to the portion of the law that deals with blocking revenue.

Many smaller, “noncommercial” sites (those with very little ad/associate revenue) are funded by the users, who donate monthly or annually to keep the sites online. PayPal, AmazonPayments, Google Checkout - those services allow these niche sites to thrive and focus on smaller communities and interests. And sometimes, the costs for the servers can be hundreds of dollars a month if there’s enough discussion going on, or if people are sharing fan-created works that fall under Fair Use.

How many of those sites will be cut off because The Powers That Be don’t like a topic or a discussion taking place on the site? We saw what Righthaven did these last two years, using the DMCA to bully sites; SOPA - as it ignores the concept of Fair Use - is just a sop for IP rights bullies to shut down discussions that they don’t agree with.

Imagine you’re the fictional university of Nepp State, and you don’t like people using your uniform or logo to criticize the systematic abuse and cover-up by coaches of the Quodpot Team. You hold a trademark (it doesn’t even have to be registered) in your logo and jersey design, so you use SOPA to complain to PayPal and GoogleAds about the sites that have icons showing the “ghostbusters” symbol over your jersey design.

Under SOPA, PayPal and GoogleAds would have five days to cut off the site’s account, payments, and ability to accept donations from its users and the trademark holder can go to the Justice Department to ask that the site’s DNS be blocked - while there’s a provision that allows the site to remove the content in those five days, that’s in the realm of censorship.

Gigaom touches on these issues as they pertain to activists like OWS.

I don’t normally link to RedState but their summary of the situation and its impact on free speech is well-put.

And here’s the perspective of some engineers at DSLReports

The EFF writes about the impact of SOPA on Flickr, Etsy and Vimeo. Did you know that buildings are protected by copyright and sometimes trademark? Take a photo in front of one and put it on Facebook or Flickr (or YouTube, or a print you’re selling at etsy) and you’re putting yourself and the site at risk.

What will you stop doing if SOPA becomes law?