This is what my company thinks is needed http://fucksopaact.com/legislation.html

About SOPA and PIPA, despite involving lots of money, I personally believe that the issue of intellectual property and piracy are just an excuse and an opportunity for ‘Captain America’ to recover the POWER to INFORM. Understand inform as synonym ‘shaping’.

Note that Mr. Shirky does not go into any speicific language in SOPA to back up his claims –this is because he cannot do so, as his argument falls apart when faced with the facts.

First of all, he talks of “censorship” — theft is not free speech, and unless you are posting other people’s copyrighted material in great quantity, or facilitating such and refusing to implement procedures to remove it upon request, then SOPA can’t touch you. He’s wrong too in saying that it won’t work; violating sites aren’t just “removed from domain name” searches, they are also going to be blocked by ISPs unless they respond to infringement claims. Strangely enough, just last year liberal countries like Sweden and the Netherlands did exactly that in ordering Pirate Bay blocked, and there has been no cry of “censorship” so far.

Like everybody on the tech/net side of the debate, Shirky makes a big point about how the bill was drafted by media companies: what he ignores is how it will also benefit artists and content creators of all levels — not just corporations — who are seeing their work pirated on a mass scale. And this is hardly a one-sided business vs. the people affair: the tech/net industry spent $120 million lobbying Washington in 2010 alone, a fact that rarely gets mentioned. That is comparable to what the RIAA and MPAA bring to bear.

Shirky is also going on about people “producing” content, when there is absolutely nothing in SOPA which can affect content creators posting their own content. Zero. This is a non-issue that he brings to the table here to obfuscate the real issue, which is ripping and piracy. His whole “sharing with your friends” idea is hardly a legitimate analogy to what is really going on, where one upload can and will be accessed by tens of thousands of people, often to the economic ruin of people who funded an album/film/software product.

“Some of what we share is what we made, some of what we share is what we found, some of it is what we made out of what we found.” Note that not once does he mention that the vast bulk of the stuff being “shared” on the sites targeted by SOPA is NONE of the above, but rather stuff made by other people and offered for sale through legal channels which are being bypassed, often to the the profit of the sites engaged in facilitating this bypass. “The biggest producers of content on the Internet are us, we’re getting policed.” That is so bogus it isn’t even funny. He seems to think that uploading a Hollywood movie counts as “producing content”, I guess. If it’s self-produced content, how in the world can anyone put a charge of copyright infringement against it?

“Guilty until proven innocent” my ass. No action can be taken under SOPA without a court order, and to obtain such will obviously require both proof of ownership of copyright and proof of infringement in a court of law. Court orders also require time and money (legal fees), and anyone throwing up spurious claims could well be liable to a civil counter-suit, so it is hard to see people making frivolous claims and getting far with it. Also, any infringement subject to SOPA is required to cause at least $1,000 USD in damages. So a person sharing even a copyright-protected item with a friend or two wouldn’t even be affected under the bill. Now if you upload that file and make it available to one and all, thousands or tens of thousands of people, then you might see something happening, and justifiably so IMO. But at the end of the day, SOPA is about blocking access to sites proven to be pirate, not going after individual users. In fact, this is the solution sought that DOESN’T require going after individuals –it is more about turning off the tap, which seems to be what Mr. Shirky really fears, and end to his beloved “free” content.

The idea that YouTube or Facebook would be targeted is one that’s repeated endlessly; first of all, such sites have to have as their primary purpose facilitating copyright infringement –that would certainly be hard to prove about either of those sites. (And YouTube, for one, already has procedures for copyright holders to file infringement claims and takedown requests; I fail to see why anyone would go to the burden of seeking a court order when they could get faster and cheaper remedy through sending them an e-mail.) Secondly, SOPA only mandates reasonable and technologically feasible remedies –i.e., a site or provider can’t be asked to do something they don’t have the technology to perform — and that provides sites a LOT of wiggle room. It is impossible to read users’ minds and predict what content people will post and whether it is copyrighted or not, obviously, so sites cannot be asked to do so. Similarly, there is no central copyright database or anything that could be used to police all users’ posts.

What sites can be asked to do, though, and what is perfectly reasonable, is that they remove/block copyrighted content upon request from the copyright holder — some sites, like YouTube or Rapidshare, already do this. The worst violators, and the sort for which SOPA was designed to deal with, deliberately leave NO possibility of contact whatsoever. These are often the sites which are charging membership fees for anonymous/encrypted monthly access to pirated content, or even flat-out selling such content. In both cases they are profiting off work which was made by other parties without compensating them in the least. This is the version of the Net Mr. Shirky seeks to defend?