We see it in the blogosphere too often. Great headline, yawn of a blog post. Yet, because of its killer title, it gets shared across the Twitterverse without being read.
SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act] may be a great headline. But the bill itself is a disappointment and dangerous to the Internet we know now and the creative, communicative power of tomorrow.
Looking over The Domino Project’s listing of who supports SOPA (mostly entertainment and publishing corporate execs – not the artists and authors per se). After following the link to this article about Everything is a Remix and watching the video, I noticed this bit:
An example of this would be Walt Disney making beautiful art of such stories as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Alice In Wonderland. Disney played absolutely no part in the creation of these stories, but he did adapt them, giving the public classic films that have stood the test of time. With that in mind, let’s see what happens if one of us — members of the general public — try to make use of characters from the The Lion King.
Wait a minute. Disney was one of the corporations list in supporting SOPA. And if SOPA existed in Walt’s day, would that mean no Snow White, no Alice, no rabbit hole?
If SOPA goes through, the world stops being freely flat and we won’t have to be concerned about having a global reach. Who knows, maybe the Prohibition Act will make a comeback.
SOPA will make it harder to do the good and creative things. Putting bars up will raise the rate of the crime they are trying to stop.
A video on SOPA found via Fred Wilson’s site:
And for an example of Everything is a Remix:
