Sharing fannish enthusiasm!
Always Heidi. Usually with an 8. Often watching Supernatural, White Collar, Leverage, MCU/Avengers or revisiting Harry Potter. Fan of pink, crossovers and popcorn. Frequently traveling (including to Ascendio in Orlando, July 12-15).
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Photo reblogged from STFU, Conservatives
The Internet Defense League
The Internet can always use more heroes and Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, and Fight for the Future have formed the Internet Defense League to make it so.
Public enemy number one: ACTA and CISPA style legislation that seems to sprout like mushrooms these days.
Via Forbes:
Ohanian describes the project, which they plan to officially launch next month, as a “Bat-Signal for the Internet.” Any website owner can sign up on the group’s website to add a bit of code to his or her site–or receive that code by email at the time of a certain campaign–that can be triggered in the case of a political crisis like SOPA, adding an activist call-to-action to all the sites involved, such as a widget or banner asking users to sign petitions, call lawmakers, or boycott companies.
“People who wish to be tapped can see, oh look, the Bat-Signal is up. Time to do something,” says Ohanian. “Whatever website you own, this is a way for you to be notified if something comes up and take some basic actions…If we aggregate everyone that’s doing it, the numbers start exploding.”
Developers are encouraged to join the League. GitHub is here, a Google Group here and Tracker is here.
Love that Alexis Ohanian has jumped into online activism with both feet. It may be an even bigger gift to the Web than Reddit was.
I like the idea in theory, but there’s always a risk in giving any third party control over the ability to put content on your site. Then again, we do that every day when we embed images, or video (even if it’s on an established site, because people can change the text on videos on youtube any time, can’t they)?
So I am considering doing this on my LJ but I probably won’t recommend it to sites that aren’t mostly-personal without more investigation into it.
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Photoset reblogged from Untitled by choice
Not Sure If Art
A second limited edition (of 50) screen print I did for the “Memes” show featuring over 100 artists at Gallery 1988, Melrose. Show opens tomorrow, Friday 4th 7-10PM and all of the work will appear on the website on Saturday. Best times.
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If you care about media, if you are a creative professional, or if you’re just generally interested in the sad state of intellectual property law, you might want to watch this. (And the other videos in the series as well, if you haven’t seen them already.)
I can’t count the number of times I’ve said, “Man, US Copyright Law is a fucking disaster!” and someone has politely refrained from rolling their eyes and suggested that I’m just annoyed that I can’t write fanfiction without feeling guilty. Or outright accused me of not being angry enough about piracy.
Oh my god if only it were just about fanfiction and piracy!
Right now, the system is set up to promote the best interests of corporations and aggressively guarded estates over those of basically everyone else. Right now, I could be sued on a whim for copyright infringement on hilariously flimsy grounds, and I would probably settle out of court because I don’t have millions of dollars to spend on legal fees. Right now, patent trolls are forcing startups out of business. It’s a mess! It is a DISASTER, the scope of which I’m frankly not qualified to even try to describe! It’s the kind of thing I lie awake freaking out about at night!
I’m glad Kirby Ferguson has taken it upon himself to try and spread the word. Thanks, man. <3
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Photo reblogged from Emma Grant
WOOP WOOP! WARNING, POLITICAL COMMENTARY! WOOP WOOP!
Based on the fact that the contraceptive hearing did not include a single woman.
Remember when Darrell Issa was really pissy that the SOPA hearings didn’t include input from tech industry or website or social networking companies?
Re SOPA, he said:
“The public deserves a full discussion about the consequences of changing the way Americans access information and communicate on the Internet today.”
He was, btw, right. A full discussion that includes a wide range of perspectives is important when Congress is looking into any new law.
ANY new law.
#hypocrite
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Show your support for the right to remix: http://transformativeworks.org/show-your-support-right-remix
Short blog post from me about exemption proposals: http://www.rachaelip.com/archives/491
(Source: rachaelvaughn)
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Photo reblogged from WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) claims that SOPA and PIPA are aimed at stopping online piracy. But as this infographic demonstrates, it’s really about fighting innovation.
(Embiggen at Infographic: Why the movie industry is so wrong about SOPA)
Betamaxes and VHS’s, Walkmans, floppy disk drives, downloads, youtube: All Things the Industry Has Been Against
How have they changed your life?
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Link reblogged from not language but a map
The Federal Bureau of Investigation moved against a group of suspected online pirates Thursday, targeting the popular file-sharing website megaupload.com a day after Washington lawmakers were besieged by complaints about legislation designed to crack down on the online sharing of pirated copies of music, movies and other material, people familiar with the matter said.
Investigators said there was no connection between arrests in their two-year investigation and the political firestorm that erupted this week over a pending vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act.
This is a big deal, and even if it’s not related to SOPA, the timing certainly does a lot to put it on the minds of those worried about the law.
Signal boosting, because what.
Reblogging with two legal questions/thoughts:
1. I wonder if the timing was coincidental or purposeful. But either way, it will backfire because clearly, if they can shut down a site that has a lot of legitimate, noninfringing usages under current law why do they need SOPA or PIPA?
2. Even in a post-Napster universe, especially where so much storage is done “in the cloud”, what will the impact of this case be on/from the Sony Betamax case?
HUH. I think this issue just crashed tumblr…
(Source: shortformblog)
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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.
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Link reblogged from That Girl With The Trollpunks
Major game companies Nintendo, Sony and Electronic Arts have quietly removed themselves from the official list of organizations that support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
On the surface, the gaming companies probably threw their support to the bill because it would…
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Link reblogged from you give up this poisonous dream ... you come home
We did it — at least for now. The House Judiciary Committee looked certain to vote for the Stop Online Piracy Act today.
Instead, because of the work of so many rank-and-file Internet users, the bill’s lead sponsor acknowledged that our concerns are legitimate, and adjourned the committee…
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Link reblogged from WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR
That unions and artists are some of those spearheading SOPA and PIPA is at once troubling and sad.
I am appalled that my union, The Screen Actor’s Guild, officially supports SOPA. I doubt it matters, but I am at least one member who is disgusted by the guild’s misguided support for extremely bad legislation that will do NOTHING to actually curb or stop IP theft.
Wil isn’t the only creative person who thinks that SOPA is the wrong way to protect IP theft. There’s a fantastic article explaining why Justin Bieber’s early career on YouTube, covering pop classics and uploading them, could, if done with SOPA as law (and if he wasn’t Canadian) result in jail time for young Justin.
… the real problem here is just how broadly this is drafted, because no matter what the true intentions may be, the fact that it very easily could be read this way is quite troubling. He notes that there is simply
no defense for broad drafting of a new felony in U.S. criminal law. When crafting a criminal statute with serious jail time at stake, it’s incumbent on the legislators to properly narrow the scope of the law, rather than to write a really broad law and then count on prosecutorial discretion to ensure it isn’t misapplied.
And that’s really the key issue. The fact that you can construct a very credible argument that the law puts Bieber in jail… even if others can construct an argument that it doesn’t is a huge problem in and of itself. -
Post reblogged from
spinningthroughaworldinmotion:
They just entered in “The Internet is for Porn” into the record.
Random IP law fact: Entering copyrighted works into the record without the permission of the copyrightholder is legal and not an infringement of the copyrighted work.
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UPDATED STOP SOPA POST
PLEASE REBLOG. Originally posted in November, 2011.
Sometime in the last month, you may’ve seen the above image at OccupyTheGame.com, or seen the letter from Google, Yahoo!, Mozilla, eBay, Creative Commons and other sites/groups in the New York Times today about the “Stop Internet Piracy Act”, which does nothing 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 send a letter to 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 them out and do what you can to stop SOPA.
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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?
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Photoset reblogged from Recalibrate your statistics.
And then Thor showed up and replaced the Senate with Asgard.
If we can’t protect the Internet, you can be damn sure we’ll avenge it.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
(Source: manipulativelittleshit)
