Preaching to the choir, or why SOPA is bad for us.: seanan

Preaching to the choir, or why SOPA is bad for us.

A good chunk of the internet is blacked out today to protest SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP). If you have somehow managed to miss this, you must not visit any news or geek-culture blogs, read very many web comics, use Google or the Firefox homepage, or access Wikipedia. (Also, if you have somehow managed to miss this because you don't use the internet for any of the things I've cited above, I am a little bit afraid of you. What do you use the internet for? How did you even find this page? Are you a robot?)

How has the blackout impacted me? This is my morning routine:

1. Get up, get ready for work.
2. Internet! FOREVER! Okay, for about fifteen minutes. First up, web comics.
3. Second, toy collecting sites.
4. Thirdly, io9 and Television Without Pity.
5. Wikipedia, to both check facts about things I'm writing (do parrots eat meat?) and to confirm which shows I follow will have new episodes tonight (for some reason I trust Wikipedia more than I trust the TV Guide site).

This is my morning routine after SOPA:

1. Get up, get ready for work. Because everything else is blocked, removed, or under attack.

This is a broad-strokes "protection of copyright" that actually goes so far above and beyond the call of duty that it's like getting a pack of trained attack basilisks to keep those damn kids off your lawn. Basilisk crap is going to wind up getting everywhere, but who cares? No more kids on the lawn!

Now, I am a creator of things, and I appreciate and enjoy making money off of them. It enables me to do silly little things like keeping the power on and feeding the cats. I appreciate and enjoy it even more when people don't steal from me. But you know what doesn't steal from me? Book reviews. But SOPA could make it a crime to post book covers or quote inside text, something my favorite book reviewers often do. Hell, SOPA could make it a crime for me to maintain my own website, since I use art that is technically under copyright to either my publishers or the original cover artists, and if someone wanted to be a real dick, they could report me for posting pieces of my own books.

You know what else doesn't steal from me? Fanfic. The legal arguments about fanfic and fan art are huge and complicated and a matter for another day, but I can honestly say that I have received email from people saying "I encountered this piece of fic about your work and so I read the originals." I haven't received email saying "I encountered this piece of fic about your work and it was so bad that now I am stealing all your shit forever." Whatever impact fan works may have on my sales, and whatever the legality behind transformative fan work, it isn't stealing from me. It isn't internet piracy. But under SOPA, you could totally rat out fanfic archives and most of DeviantArt for violating copyrights, and watch the pretty, pretty fires as they burned.

Piracy pisses me off. I don't feel that I have wasted my time when I got upset about piracy and copyright. But there is such a huge difference between "I will now protect you from piracy" and what these bills will do that isn't even funny. Don't believe me? I mean, why should you? I am, after all, not a lawyer or anything like that. But I do have access to the internet, and to the smart people it currently contains, the ones I am allowed to communicate with freely and without fear of being slapped for violating a law that seems a bit too broadly written.

John Murphy would like to talk to you about SOPA. Better yet, he does it very intelligently and coherently, with good, clean information.

Still not convinced? The folks at reddit have actually dissected the text of SOPA, and point out some terrifying potential abuses. If you want to get your legal language on, this is the place to go.

And the ever-fabulous and profane Chuck Wendig has also pointed out some of the major issues with these anti-piracy measures. Like me, he's approaching it from a writer's perspective. He just says "fuck" more.

You know what? Fuck SOPA. Fuck PIPA. Fuck the idiots who think that they can control the internet. And fuck them twice for forcing today's internet blackout, because I still don't know whether parrots eat meat.

Fuckers.

kyrielle

January 19 2012, 00:46:07 UTC 5 years ago

New comment

Fuck them, yes.

On the other hand, I have now learned things I did not know about parrots. Had you been able to perform your research on Wikipedia, I might not have had such an entertaining several minutes reading about parrots and meat (and contemplating the fact that I am glad I do not own a parrot, as I prefer not to have to answer the challenge 'your dinner or your fingers?').

seanan_mcguire

January 26 2012, 17:49:19 UTC 5 years ago

Well, then, today served a purpose!

catsittingstill

January 19 2012, 01:57:30 UTC 5 years ago

I contacted both Senators and my Representative and registered my objections to the bills.

February 7 2012, 16:49:47 UTC 5 years ago

Thank you.

amazon_syren

January 19 2012, 02:26:38 UTC 5 years ago

Completely unrelated to SOPA (except for the part where we're talking via the internet): I don't know about all parrots, but the parrot we live with can, and does, eat (cooked) meat: Chicken and turkey, which are slightly disconcerting, and also pork (rarely) and eggs, plus cheese. She LOVES cheese (although that's beside the point).

It doesn't seem to be doing her any harm - though she doesn't get much (think 1 tsp per year, spread out over 365 days) and she rather enjoys it. I suspect (based on, granted, one raised-by-humans parrot, so ymmv) that a given parrot -or at least a given parrot of this kind (Senegal) would quite happily chow down (or at least nibble) on someone else's eggs and/or babies and/or corpse if they came upon them in the wild.

TTFN,
Amazon.

February 1 2012, 18:40:08 UTC 5 years ago

Parrots are awesome.

soundingsea

January 19 2012, 02:33:38 UTC 5 years ago

I can honestly say that I have received email from people saying "I encountered this piece of fic about your work and so I read the originals." I haven't received email saying "I encountered this piece of fic about your work and it was so bad that now I am stealing all your shit forever."

Seriously! How is it that Big Media can't understand something you've put so clearly?

February 1 2012, 18:39:45 UTC 5 years ago

I do not know.

martianmooncrab

January 19 2012, 04:50:43 UTC 5 years ago

a pack of trained attack basilisks to keep those damn kids off your lawn

maybe a pair of Gargoyles instead?

January 23 2012, 20:37:07 UTC 5 years ago

They'd be very slow about clearing the damn kids off the lawn.

January 24 2012, 01:21:19 UTC 5 years ago

*death from above*

rattyfleef

January 19 2012, 06:11:00 UTC 5 years ago

Adding to the Parrot Trivia section. When the zoo near my house closed we adopted a macaw who'd had a stroke (uninterested in meat, loved tea-cakes and almonds) and an Amazonian orange-winged parrot (Amazona amazonica tobagensis) named Lola. Lola was close to 60 and had a limited vocabulary. She called meat 'arnold' and would ask for it by name from the moment she smelled it cooking. She loved pork; she'd coo at you and her pupils would expand and contract rapidly with excitement and she'd fluff her head-feathers, and she was very gentle taking it from your fingers. Her control was fantastic; she could crack right through an almond but, if annoyed, she'd just snap at you and hold your finger--no marks left, but a clear indication that she was *choosing* not to hurt you. She was cantankerous, mouthy, demanding, and hated everyone over the age of 12 <3

February 1 2012, 18:38:51 UTC 5 years ago

Awesome.

moth2fic

January 19 2012, 09:55:36 UTC 5 years ago

Thanks for a great summary of the position for writers, and for the links. Everything you said was swirling around in my head all day (while I carefully didn't visit the internet at all as my own tiny protest).

I write more original fic than fanfic but I recently wrote a fanfic piece for an LJ challenge (based on Naomi Novik's Temeraire series) and I know from comments it has sent at least a couple of readers rushing off to buy her books.