Why stopping SOPA is important.

From NMC:

On January 24th, the Senate will vote on SOPA, the “Stop Internet Piracy Act,” Today– January 18th– Redit, Boing Boing, and a lot of other internet sites have joined in a 12 hour blackout warning folks that this legislation could, literally, destroy the internet as we know it.

Those participating in the blackout are saying: Call your representatives and tell them you oppose it.

There’s an ongoing and increasingly desperate by pre-internet copyright holders to blame new technology on their failure to adapt to it. Anyone who has read about about these sort of technological changes– from sheet music to player pianos, from that to records, from records to radio, etc.– will know this story.

The major songwriter’s performance rights organization of the 20s and early thirties, ASCAP, demanded a set percentage of radio station revenues for the broadcasting of its songs (and refused to accept many black songwriters). ASCAP thus effectively refused performance rights to its songs on radio, and a new organization– BMI (“Broadcast Music, Inc.) was formed that handled songwriters willing to have their music played on radio (and more willing to accept black composers).

That’s the kind of refusal to adapt I’m talking about. The message to copyright holders is that the world has changed, and they need to adapt to it, not the other way around.

The best explanation I’ve seen about what’s wrong with SOPA is from Boing Boing. Here’s what was said:

On January 18, Boing Boing will join Reddit and other sites around the Internet in “going dark” to oppose SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world. Boing Boing could never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we’d have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren’t in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits.

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