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.