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Sorry it’s been so long, y’all. I could give you a whole list of excuses about WHY I haven’t posted lately, but let’s just agree not to talk about it and move forward, m’kay?
So. Today is the big blackout protesting SOPA and PIPA. Wikipedia’s dark today, as is Reddit, and lots of smaller sites have taken themselves offline as well. Google is up and running but has a dark bar across it’s name on the homepage and if you click it, it will take you to all sorts of information about the two bills that are at issue.
If you want to learn about what’s going on, I suggest going to:
1) The Wall Street Journal’s Q&A
2) The actual SOPA bill (this version’s nicely searchable for the problematic paragraphs).
If you want to protest what’s going on, you can go to Google’s homepage and follow their links to contact your representatives.
Someone on Facebook asked me, in a nutshell, what this was all about, so I decided I’d take some time to talk about my thoughts on the issue. Let’s face it, Internet piracy is a problem. If, like me, your livelihood depends on people purchasing copies of something you’ve created, it’s a BIG PROBLEM. Authors are forever getting up in arms about Internet piracy and rightly so. To me, it’s very telling that one of the main communities SOPA and PIPA are intended to protect are one of the most vocal opponents of the bills.
The problem is, because of the language in the bills, they COULD be interpreted in a way that would allow the government to shut down websites that weren’t actually in the business of selling other people’s stuff in an illegal way. Sites like Wikipedia and Facebook and Twitter, which function primarily based on user-uploaded content that is not vetted by the host site before posting could be targeted/punished for having pirated material.
There’s also a DNS conversion issue at stake, but it seems like it’s being resolved. (This gets really technical. You can look it up if you want, but since it doesn’t seem like something that’s going to happen, I’m not going to talk about it right now.)
If SOPA and PIPA become law, they probably WOULDN’T be used to limit free speech on the Internet. That’s not the intent of the bill. The problem is that it’s been badly written enough that it COULD be interpreted that way, and who knows what crazy thing could happen years down the road and so why not WRITE IT BETTER so that there isn’t so much grey area for the attorneys and elected officials to muck around in later?
Yes, piracy’s awful, but congress needs to go back and craft a more careful bill. That’s what the protests are about. And lots of people are frustrated with Congress’s unwillingness to do what authors do EVERY DAY and rewrite something so that it’s better than it was before.
Personally, I think the real problem is that the bill has been written by (mostly) old men, many of whom are out of touch with how the Internet really functions as a global community. Ergo, THEY don’t see the problem with what they’ve written, while our generation is saying “Hey! HEY! Don’t write it like that, you guys!”
I don’t think anyone is out to squash the free speech of the Internet in the United States (though other countries, namely China, certainly aren’t shy about this, and I think it feeds the fear of the protestors.) I think everyone wants to protect the interests of authors and movie makers and other people who are at risk for e-piracy. I think it’s good that Congress wrote some bills trying to help stop that stuff. I think it’s good that people who are better versed in the virtual world than Congress is looked at the bills and said “these need some work.”
I think it’s pretty lame that Congress has, so far, said “Nah. It’s good enough.”
I hope they change their minds. I hope, like all good authors, they listen to the well-reasoned criticisms they’ve received and revise the bills for the better. I guess we’ll see.
Today I signed books at the Irvington library’s 10 year commemorative celebration. This is my neighborhood library, so I was excited to participate. There were some other local authors coming, too. One of them I already knew, but I glossed over the other two names in the preparation emails.
Many (most?) of you know that it’s November, which is the official month of Pie Consumption, as American Thanksgiving is at the end of the month.