This is a guest post by a friend and colleague, Edward Shepherd, who I've known virtually for quite a while, and who is a reader and contributor here at About.com Freelance Writing. I've been quite busy with two rush clients, and have neglected SOPA, to a point. But when Ed reached out to me by email today, I couldn't ignore his passion on the subject. Take a look.
SOPA and PIPA: Bad for Freelance Writers and Bloggers?
Hello Writers! Your freelance mentor, Allena, has graciously allowed me to interrupt her regularly scheduled program for an important message that should concern all of us. You are likely to have encountered at least one website that has posted some form of online protest against SOPA/PIPA over the last few days. So you may be wondering, "Why should I be worried about SOPA/PIPA?"
As Writers, we understand that our primary avenue of communication, business, and expression is the Internet. Therefore, the answer to this question is to take a closer look at these two bills before we choose a course of action, if any.
SOPA is short for the Stop Online Piracy Act (House Bill 326), and PIPA (Protect IP) is short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (Senate Bill 968). The bills were originally intended to target overseas web sites that sell counterfeit goods of all type. But these bills also give the Justice Department the right to yank these sites from all links and search engines and even more. In addition, the bills allow attorneys to lay a host of claims against these 'eligible' sites and effectively shut them down.
So, why would Writers want to fight these two innocent sounding bills? I asked myself the same question until I did some digging. As these documents reveal, due to the non-specific wording, internet free speech would be threatened in a variety of ways. This vague wording is what is causing such concern with many groups who are in open protest and in support of free speech on the web.
Freelance Writing and blogging on the web would require impossible adherence to the open interpretation of nebulous wording contained in both SOPA and PIPA ... that is, if they are allowed to pass as law. On January 24th, the Senate will vote on PIPA.
My purpose for this article is to ask you to actively support your rights before they are removed. I am not asking you to take my side, but I am stating the potential of abuse that is likely to occur if these bills are passed.
I invite all of you Writers to do your own research on these two bills and not just listen to me. Use your own research. There are good reasons why Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, and many other useful sites are actively protesting these two bills. If you want to do something to voice your concerns quickly, you can go to the Mozilla link that will allow you to quickly give your voice to your region's legal representatives.
Some more links of interest. First, visit this great article from the About.com Guide on Broadband:
Then:
https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/sopa-pipa/
http://lifehacker.com/5860205/all-about-sopa-the-bill-thats-going-to-cripple-your-internet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/wikipedia-sopa-pipa-article-1.1007847?pgno=1
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100912/12440610969.shtml
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:h.r.3261:
Edward Shepherd is a a writer with an engineering background, but with a passion for creative writing. He has two books in the works.
Since this was posted, there has been a movement in Congress to slow this all down. That doesn’t mean it has gone away. Government control of any type of media is alarming (think Syria, which has even banned it’s own state-sponsored site from broadcasting some things it supposedly allowed previously). There are already laws on the books regarding internet piracy, and copyright infringement. If the govt. would put half as much money and time into the technology to stop hackers as it wants to do with this legislation, it might be effective. These bills however, are all about censoring websites and other media. If the motion picture industry would hire coders to insert anit-piracy code into their products they could take care of the problem themselves; instead they want to use political contribution threats to blackmail Congress, without regard to what it does to free speech.