A Discussion about the Stop Online Piracy Act

First.  Google's "Stop SOPA"  Petition.

Better yet:  Email your Senator

Second, I've seen people argue both sides.  This has been one of the more comprehensible breakdowns that I've read. 

Confessions of a Hollywood Professional: Why I Can't Support The Stop Online Piracy Act

Excerpts from the blog:

According to a report published by the AFL-CIO, online piracy costs content providers (mostly TV networks and movie studios) a lot of money. Around $20 billion annually. That, in turn, costs a staggering number of industry-related jobs - over 140,000 by some estimates.

As  a freelance film editor,  this scares the hell out of me.  If the  networks and studios I work for don't make money, sooner or later I'm  out of a job. And if I'm out of a job long enough, I lose my union  health benefits, my pension, the whole ball of wax.

I know it scares the hell out of my union, IATSE, judging by numerous emails warning how my livelihood is in grave danger from "foreign rogue sites" dedicated to wholesale theft of the intellectual property of my employers.

On the flip side, there were petitions filing my inbox from internet watchdog groups urging me to tell Congress to "preserve free speech", and that if I didn't, the "internet as we know it" would cease to exist.

Now, if you don't know what they're talking about, you're not not alone. Until I started getting these emails, I too was blissfully ignorant about the alphabet-soup of anti-piracy  legislation currently grinding it's way through the bowels of Congress -  the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate.

But as I researched the bills and clawed my way though mountains of evidence on both sides predicting internet Armageddon, I quickly realized online piracy (and the solutions being put forth to curb it) is something we don't have the luxury to ignore. Because what happens in the next month could profoundly affect many aspect of our lives, not just how we interact online.

{...} 

( More behind the cut )

( more behind the cut )

Remember how I mentioned "fair use" and "safe harbor" at the beginning of this post?  Let's circle back to that now.

I use a lot of social media - YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to share information, links, videos and other online content. And I do this under the"Fair Use" doctrine, which allows me to use copyrighted material without permission for "transformative" purposes such as commentary, criticism and parody.

What  is a "transformative" use? If this definition seems ambiguous or vague,  be aware that millions of dollars in legal fees have been spent  attempting to define what qualifies as a fair use. There are no  hard-and-fast rules, only general rules and varied court decisions,  because the judges and lawmakers who created the fair use exception did  not want to limit its definition. Like free speech, they wanted it to  have an expansive meaning that could be open to interpretation.

Now, to illustrate my point, I'm going to link to this really cool video created by a fan of "Castle", the ABC Television show I work on.  

(ME: I didn't copy the link.  We all know what fanvids look like)

Great video, isn't it?

It also happens to be made up of hundreds of copyrighted clips I'm reasonably sure ABC Television never gave permission to use. But that's OK, because I'm also reasonably sure the video is covered by Fair Use. But if I'm wrong about that, this is where DMCA's "safe harbor" provisions come in.

Safe Harbor assumes I didn't knowingly post anything which violates US copyright law.  So even if my ISP gets a take-down notice from ABC, Safe Harbor is supposed to protect me as long as I comply with the notice and remove the video.

( Read more... )

SOPA/PIPA gets rid of Safe Harbors. There is no safe space. A copyright holder can initiate a "private right of action", convince a judge to issue an injunction (which we now know is way too easy to do) get your domain blocked, your advertising pulled and your finances frozen.

And thanks to to SOPA/PIPA's immunity provisions, a copyright holder wouldn't even need a court order shut you down, just a letter to your service providers threatening to.  {...}

Between blanket immunity, the loss of safe harbor, and the lack of any redress for impacted site owners, SOPA/PIPA actually incentivizes abuse.

It's already happening. Entire legal industries have been built around responding to DMCA takedown notices in bulk. Thin-skinned businesses routinely ignore Fair Use to issue DMCA takedown notices against sites which criticize them.  

( Read more... )

There are also some nasty implications for political campaigns. Implications that ought to give the bill's Congressional supporters pause.

Imagine you are running for Congress in a competitive House district. You give a strong interview to a local morning news show and your campaign posts the clip on your website. When your opponent's campaign sees the video, it decides to play hardball and sends a notice to your Internet service provider alerting them to what it deems "infringing content." It doesn't matter if the content is actually pirated. .... If you don't take the video down, even if you believe that the content is protected under fair use, your website goes dark.

I'm sure nothing like that would ever happen, because, you know, it never has before.

During the waning days of the 2008 presidential race, there was an important but overlooked occurrence on the John McCain campaign. In mid-October, the McCain campaign awoke to find that its Web videos and online advertisements were disappearing from its YouTube page.

The culprit turned out to be a major television network claiming they owned portions of the videos and that posting the clips was a violation of copyright law. Even though the campaign, and many others in the online community, believed the content to be privileged under the "Fair Use Doctrine","the videos were pulled down.

(...) THE DIVIDE OVER SOPA/PIPA ISN'T POLITICAL - IT'S BETWEEN THOSE WHO UNDERSTAND THE INTERNET AND THOSE WHO DON'T

What do Darrell Issa,  Nancy Pelosi, the ACLU, Daily Kos, RedState.com,  and Ron Paul have in common? They all oppose SOPA/PIPA.

Personally, I've never agreed with Darrel Issa on any issue ever, but I agree with him on this.

( Read more... )

(...)  I believe my union leadership is acting in good faith to look after the best interests of its membership. But I don't think my union leadership understands how the Internet works. {...}  Look, you can't un-ring this bell. Internet file sharing, streaming  video, and movies-on-demand aren't going away.  Fans of American  television shows and movies use the internet to form international online communities, upload their favorite clips via YouTube and share them on Twitter and Facebook.  As an industry, we should encourage them. Because today's "pirates" are tomorrow's customers. 

We've been down this road before with the music industry. Ten years ago, while all the major record labels responded to file sharing by locking up content and suing Napster into the ground, Steve Jobs quietly developed iTunes. By tapping into a market that was already habituated to file sharing and offering quality content conveniently and legally at a price point people were willing to pay, Apple dominated the music industry while the record labels tanked.

We either follow the path of the record labels or we follow the path Apple took.

(Full article here )

A Discussion about the Stop Online Piracy Act

First.  Google's "Stop SOPA"  Petition.

Better yet:  Email your Senator

Second, I've seen people argue both sides.  This has been one of the more comprehensible breakdowns that I've read. 

Confessions of a Hollywood Professional: Why I Can't Support The Stop Online Piracy Act

Excerpts from the blog:

According to a report published by the AFL-CIO, online piracy costs content providers (mostly TV networks and movie studios) a lot of money. Around $20 billion annually. That, in turn, costs a staggering number of industry-related jobs - over 140,000 by some estimates.

As  a freelance film editor,  this scares the hell out of me.  If the  networks and studios I work for don't make money, sooner or later I'm  out of a job. And if I'm out of a job long enough, I lose my union  health benefits, my pension, the whole ball of wax.

I know it scares the hell out of my union, IATSE, judging by numerous emails warning how my livelihood is in grave danger from "foreign rogue sites" dedicated to wholesale theft of the intellectual property of my employers.

On the flip side, there were petitions filing my inbox from internet watchdog groups urging me to tell Congress to "preserve free speech", and that if I didn't, the "internet as we know it" would cease to exist.

Now, if you don't know what they're talking about, you're not not alone. Until I started getting these emails, I too was blissfully ignorant about the alphabet-soup of anti-piracy  legislation currently grinding it's way through the bowels of Congress -  the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate.

But as I researched the bills and clawed my way though mountains of evidence on both sides predicting internet Armageddon, I quickly realized online piracy (and the solutions being put forth to curb it) is something we don't have the luxury to ignore. Because what happens in the next month could profoundly affect many aspect of our lives, not just how we interact online.

{...} 

( More behind the cut )

( more behind the cut )

Remember how I mentioned "fair use" and "safe harbor" at the beginning of this post?  Let's circle back to that now.

I use a lot of social media - YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to share information, links, videos and other online content. And I do this under the"Fair Use" doctrine, which allows me to use copyrighted material without permission for "transformative" purposes such as commentary, criticism and parody.

What  is a "transformative" use? If this definition seems ambiguous or vague,  be aware that millions of dollars in legal fees have been spent  attempting to define what qualifies as a fair use. There are no  hard-and-fast rules, only general rules and varied court decisions,  because the judges and lawmakers who created the fair use exception did  not want to limit its definition. Like free speech, they wanted it to  have an expansive meaning that could be open to interpretation.

Now, to illustrate my point, I'm going to link to this really cool video created by a fan of "Castle", the ABC Television show I work on.  

(ME: I didn't copy the link.  We all know what fanvids look like)

Great video, isn't it?

It also happens to be made up of hundreds of copyrighted clips I'm reasonably sure ABC Television never gave permission to use. But that's OK, because I'm also reasonably sure the video is covered by Fair Use. But if I'm wrong about that, this is where DMCA's "safe harbor" provisions come in.

Safe Harbor assumes I didn't knowingly post anything which violates US copyright law.  So even if my ISP gets a take-down notice from ABC, Safe Harbor is supposed to protect me as long as I comply with the notice and remove the video.

( Read more... )

SOPA/PIPA gets rid of Safe Harbors. There is no safe space. A copyright holder can initiate a "private right of action", convince a judge to issue an injunction (which we now know is way too easy to do) get your domain blocked, your advertising pulled and your finances frozen.

And thanks to to SOPA/PIPA's immunity provisions, a copyright holder wouldn't even need a court order shut you down, just a letter to your service providers threatening to.  {...}

Between blanket immunity, the loss of safe harbor, and the lack of any redress for impacted site owners, SOPA/PIPA actually incentivizes abuse.

It's already happening. Entire legal industries have been built around responding to DMCA takedown notices in bulk. Thin-skinned businesses routinely ignore Fair Use to issue DMCA takedown notices against sites which criticize them.  

( Read more... )

There are also some nasty implications for political campaigns. Implications that ought to give the bill's Congressional supporters pause.

Imagine you are running for Congress in a competitive House district. You give a strong interview to a local morning news show and your campaign posts the clip on your website. When your opponent's campaign sees the video, it decides to play hardball and sends a notice to your Internet service provider alerting them to what it deems "infringing content." It doesn't matter if the content is actually pirated. .... If you don't take the video down, even if you believe that the content is protected under fair use, your website goes dark.

I'm sure nothing like that would ever happen, because, you know, it never has before.

During the waning days of the 2008 presidential race, there was an important but overlooked occurrence on the John McCain campaign. In mid-October, the McCain campaign awoke to find that its Web videos and online advertisements were disappearing from its YouTube page.

The culprit turned out to be a major television network claiming they owned portions of the videos and that posting the clips was a violation of copyright law. Even though the campaign, and many others in the online community, believed the content to be privileged under the "Fair Use Doctrine","the videos were pulled down.

(...) THE DIVIDE OVER SOPA/PIPA ISN'T POLITICAL - IT'S BETWEEN THOSE WHO UNDERSTAND THE INTERNET AND THOSE WHO DON'T

What do Darrell Issa,  Nancy Pelosi, the ACLU, Daily Kos, RedState.com,  and Ron Paul have in common? They all oppose SOPA/PIPA.

Personally, I've never agreed with Darrel Issa on any issue ever, but I agree with him on this.

( Read more... )

(...)  I believe my union leadership is acting in good faith to look after the best interests of its membership. But I don't think my union leadership understands how the Internet works. {...}  Look, you can't un-ring this bell. Internet file sharing, streaming  video, and movies-on-demand aren't going away.  Fans of American  television shows and movies use the internet to form international online communities, upload their favorite clips via YouTube and share them on Twitter and Facebook.  As an industry, we should encourage them. Because today's "pirates" are tomorrow's customers. 

We've been down this road before with the music industry. Ten years ago, while all the major record labels responded to file sharing by locking up content and suing Napster into the ground, Steve Jobs quietly developed iTunes. By tapping into a market that was already habituated to file sharing and offering quality content conveniently and legally at a price point people were willing to pay, Apple dominated the music industry while the record labels tanked.

We either follow the path of the record labels or we follow the path Apple took.

(Full article here )

A Discussion about the Stop Online Piracy Act

First.  Google's "Stop SOPA"  Petition.

Better yet:  Email your Senator

Second, I've seen people argue both sides.  This has been one of the more comprehensible breakdowns that I've read. 

Confessions of a Hollywood Professional: Why I Can't Support The Stop Online Piracy Act

Excerpts from the blog:

According to a report published by the AFL-CIO, online piracy costs content providers (mostly TV networks and movie studios) a lot of money. Around $20 billion annually. That, in turn, costs a staggering number of industry-related jobs - over 140,000 by some estimates.

As  a freelance film editor,  this scares the hell out of me.  If the  networks and studios I work for don't make money, sooner or later I'm  out of a job. And if I'm out of a job long enough, I lose my union  health benefits, my pension, the whole ball of wax.

I know it scares the hell out of my union, IATSE, judging by numerous emails warning how my livelihood is in grave danger from "foreign rogue sites" dedicated to wholesale theft of the intellectual property of my employers.

On the flip side, there were petitions filing my inbox from internet watchdog groups urging me to tell Congress to "preserve free speech", and that if I didn't, the "internet as we know it" would cease to exist.

Now, if you don't know what they're talking about, you're not not alone. Until I started getting these emails, I too was blissfully ignorant about the alphabet-soup of anti-piracy  legislation currently grinding it's way through the bowels of Congress -  the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate.

But as I researched the bills and clawed my way though mountains of evidence on both sides predicting internet Armageddon, I quickly realized online piracy (and the solutions being put forth to curb it) is something we don't have the luxury to ignore. Because what happens in the next month could profoundly affect many aspect of our lives, not just how we interact online.

{...} 

( More behind the cut )

( more behind the cut )

Remember how I mentioned "fair use" and "safe harbor" at the beginning of this post?  Let's circle back to that now.

I use a lot of social media - YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to share information, links, videos and other online content. And I do this under the"Fair Use" doctrine, which allows me to use copyrighted material without permission for "transformative" purposes such as commentary, criticism and parody.

What  is a "transformative" use? If this definition seems ambiguous or vague,  be aware that millions of dollars in legal fees have been spent  attempting to define what qualifies as a fair use. There are no  hard-and-fast rules, only general rules and varied court decisions,  because the judges and lawmakers who created the fair use exception did  not want to limit its definition. Like free speech, they wanted it to  have an expansive meaning that could be open to interpretation.

Now, to illustrate my point, I'm going to link to this really cool video created by a fan of "Castle", the ABC Television show I work on.  

(ME: I didn't copy the link.  We all know what fanvids look like)

Great video, isn't it?

It also happens to be made up of hundreds of copyrighted clips I'm reasonably sure ABC Television never gave permission to use. But that's OK, because I'm also reasonably sure the video is covered by Fair Use. But if I'm wrong about that, this is where DMCA's "safe harbor" provisions come in.

Safe Harbor assumes I didn't knowingly post anything which violates US copyright law.  So even if my ISP gets a take-down notice from ABC, Safe Harbor is supposed to protect me as long as I comply with the notice and remove the video.

( Read more... )

SOPA/PIPA gets rid of Safe Harbors. There is no safe space. A copyright holder can initiate a "private right of action", convince a judge to issue an injunction (which we now know is way too easy to do) get your domain blocked, your advertising pulled and your finances frozen.

And thanks to to SOPA/PIPA's immunity provisions, a copyright holder wouldn't even need a court order shut you down, just a letter to your service providers threatening to.  {...}

Between blanket immunity, the loss of safe harbor, and the lack of any redress for impacted site owners, SOPA/PIPA actually incentivizes abuse.

It's already happening. Entire legal industries have been built around responding to DMCA takedown notices in bulk. Thin-skinned businesses routinely ignore Fair Use to issue DMCA takedown notices against sites which criticize them.  

( Read more... )

There are also some nasty implications for political campaigns. Implications that ought to give the bill's Congressional supporters pause.

Imagine you are running for Congress in a competitive House district. You give a strong interview to a local morning news show and your campaign posts the clip on your website. When your opponent's campaign sees the video, it decides to play hardball and sends a notice to your Internet service provider alerting them to what it deems "infringing content." It doesn't matter if the content is actually pirated. .... If you don't take the video down, even if you believe that the content is protected under fair use, your website goes dark.

I'm sure nothing like that would ever happen, because, you know, it never has before.

During the waning days of the 2008 presidential race, there was an important but overlooked occurrence on the John McCain campaign. In mid-October, the McCain campaign awoke to find that its Web videos and online advertisements were disappearing from its YouTube page.

The culprit turned out to be a major television network claiming they owned portions of the videos and that posting the clips was a violation of copyright law. Even though the campaign, and many others in the online community, believed the content to be privileged under the "Fair Use Doctrine","the videos were pulled down.

(...) THE DIVIDE OVER SOPA/PIPA ISN'T POLITICAL - IT'S BETWEEN THOSE WHO UNDERSTAND THE INTERNET AND THOSE WHO DON'T

What do Darrell Issa,  Nancy Pelosi, the ACLU, Daily Kos, RedState.com,  and Ron Paul have in common? They all oppose SOPA/PIPA.

Personally, I've never agreed with Darrel Issa on any issue ever, but I agree with him on this.

( Read more... )

(...)  I believe my union leadership is acting in good faith to look after the best interests of its membership. But I don't think my union leadership understands how the Internet works. {...}  Look, you can't un-ring this bell. Internet file sharing, streaming  video, and movies-on-demand aren't going away.  Fans of American  television shows and movies use the internet to form international online communities, upload their favorite clips via YouTube and share them on Twitter and Facebook.  As an industry, we should encourage them. Because today's "pirates" are tomorrow's customers. 

We've been down this road before with the music industry. Ten years ago, while all the major record labels responded to file sharing by locking up content and suing Napster into the ground, Steve Jobs quietly developed iTunes. By tapping into a market that was already habituated to file sharing and offering quality content conveniently and legally at a price point people were willing to pay, Apple dominated the music industry while the record labels tanked.

We either follow the path of the record labels or we follow the path Apple took.

(Full article here )

The Day the LOLcats Died

The Day the LOLcats Died

The Day the LOLcats Died

Okay, this was awesome...

The awesome is in the details.  Watching and going, hey, wait, is that black lab Darth Vader?  Oh, and Chewie.  Is that C3P0?  Hee!

Okay, this was awesome...

The awesome is in the details.  Watching and going, hey, wait, is that black lab Darth Vader?  Oh, and Chewie.  Is that C3P0?  Hee!

Okay, this was awesome...

The awesome is in the details.  Watching and going, hey, wait, is that black lab Darth Vader?  Oh, and Chewie.  Is that C3P0?  Hee!