Chuck, on the Stop Online Piracy Act

WeirdUniverse.net isn't going dark today in protest of the two proposed anti-online-piracy bills before Congress (as is Wikipedia, BoingBoing, and Reddit), but my view is that the bills nevertheless suck. It's the old Capitol Hill cliche ("Don't throw the baby out with the bath water") at turbo speed. Online piracy is bad (and I ought to know, as I've made my living for 20 years protected by copyrights). However, it's not SO bad that it's worth changing the character of the Internet to tighten the status quo on copyright. The absolutely most absurd part of the controversy is how it came about. Follow the sequence: (1) Lobbyists from the movie and music industries, with so much money bulging out of their pockets that they could barely squeeze through their Congressman's door, dribbling money on the floor behind them, hit Capitol Hill . . (2) to persuade 535 people whose knowledge of the "Intertubes" is barely greater than that of the infamous (late) Sen. Ted Stevens . . that this Internet-thingy is little more than a way for kids to send stupid text messages and play ridiculous war games and thus that what's the big deal about potentially criminalizing every website that didn't cleanse every single possibly-unauthorized image from its pages? (Ah, but in fairness, let me give an alternative view. An alternative view: "Congress sometimes does things that are even stupider than this." There. That's my alternative view.) Thankya, thankyaverrmuch.

Posted By: Chuck | Date: Wed Jan 18, 2012 | Comments (22)
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Chuck, on the Stop Online Piracy Act

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