How Can SOPA and PIPA Effect Bloggers?

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) which aimed at demolishing the online freedom and spread of speech has fortunately been postponed on January 20, 2012 after US Government saw the biggest internet protest of the time. The protests were the biggest in Internet history, with over 115 thousand sites altering their webpages with black protest banners! With Wikipedia and reddit being the heavy protestors. As soon as FBI shutdown the largest free resource sharing website "MegaUpload" , tons of attacks were launched by Anonymous just after 70 minutes on government websites such as Justice Department, the FBI, Universal Music Group, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and Broadcast Music, Inc.

 

What is SOPA and PIPA?

These are two bills which were proposed in the US parliament as an open attack on sites that promote copyright infringement of content and goods. The biggest sponsor of the bills was HOLLYWOOD which includes the film and music industry. Though this may sound just ok but if this would have been passed than thousands of web owners which include us have been destroyed completely with a complete shutdown of their servers and online existence. From Wikipedia till Google, every single web service would have been attacked and abused. Internet service providers would have been forced to block websites that promote piracy and search engines like Google would have been pressurized to stop indexing such sites and stop sending them traffic. Read the complete story here.

How Can it be a Poison to Bloggers?

Bloggers are content generators. Publishing unique content without copyright violation is termed as "True Blogging". However its really difficult to produce everything by your own due to lack of resources. In order to engage readers more bloggers often rely on sharing resources provided by third party websites. Most new bloggers due to lack of experience often violate copyrights.

For instance all those blogs where resources are availed for free downloads violate copyrights of third party producers. Blogs that share wallpapers, audios, videos, movie clips, music videos, ebooks etc. could be seriously effected by this bill if they are saving such resources and files on sites such us Megashare or Megaupload or if they are linking to torrents.

See a live example:

Such bloggers can be prisoned, put behind bars , with their careers seriously destroyed. Now bloggers and black hackers could be treated alike when it comes to court hearing.

How to make sure you stay safe?

As we have always stressed, please give more value to unique and quality content. Whether it may be SOPA or Google Panda , no one respects or allows redistributed content with re-shared material. Blogging can be a long term business with great future milestones if you feed it properly from the very first day. Write more, write good, publish something new each day and stay happy and safe forever. That's what blogging is all about.

Biggest Copyright Violator is Hollywood itself!

This is an extract of the press release published by Piratebay. Piratebay seriously accused HOLLYWOOD for giving birth to Copyright violation culture. I found this through reddit:

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012. PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they're all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it's all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It's all based on the fact that we're competition. We've proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We're just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we've stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means "trash" in Swedish. The word PIPA means "a pipe" in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you'll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can't do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we'll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really. To fix the "problem of piracy" one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they're creating "culture" but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they're fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he's complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world - because he's jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you'd get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can't access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that.

THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

 

Where do you stand?

Though the bill is still a topic of debate now and has been postponed in parliament until a unanimous agreement is reached between billionaires from Hollywood and hard working folks like us.

Rep. Lamar Smith postponed plans to draft the bill, saying "The committee remains committed to finding a solution to the problem of online piracy that protects American intellectual property and innovation ... The House Judiciary Committee will postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement on a solution."

Let us know how strongly you respect copyrights of others and how much do you preach the message of honoring others hard work. Do you think SOPA and PIPA could ever be accepted? Share your reasons and highlight any point I would have missed sharing. Peace and blessings pals! :)

You may really enjoy these related posts:

1. How To Report Copyright Violation To Blogger, Adsense or Youtube
2. MBT's crack down on Copyright Violators begins!
3. How to write a Warning Letter to Copyright Violator?

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Mohammad 1/22/2012