Editor’s Note: As an independent news source, The Gralien Report takes pride in providing quality content to its readers which, as the subtitle within the banner at the top of this page reads, falls into the category of “weird news, anomalies, and exopolitics from beyond the fringe.” Occasionally, there are also political news items of a terrestrial nature that fall into our areas of consideration; in this case, they have to do with the potential for future dissemination of content on the web by independent sources like us. Thus, our very own Matthew Oakley presents the following commentary regarding the controversies surrounding the recent Stop Online Piracy Act bill.
The current SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bill has been sending controversial shock waves across the internet. There is hardly a blog or forum that can be found that does not show strong opinions regarding this new bill, and the almost unanimous argument seems to center around the infringement of the First Amendment. Websites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, AOL, eBay, Mozilla, and a slew of others have recently united in dissent of this standing proposition before the United States Congress.
Brought before the House of Representatives in late October as the SOPA, also called the E-PARASITE Act (Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation) or H.R.3261, the bill would allow government regulation of websites such as Google, amongst others, disallowing them to advertise or support what are being called
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Well, there are some reasons we can’t say ‘No’ to piracy.
There’s no better apostle against the antipiracy laws than Lawrence Lessig.
Exhibit (A):“When America was poor, its citizens “stole.” We took the intellectual property of Dickens and other foreign artists without paying for it. We didn’t call it stealing, but they did. We called it a sensible way for a developing nation to develop. Eventually, we saw it was better to protect their rights as well as ours – better because we had rights to protect elsewhere, too. But we only imposed this burden on ourselves when it made sense to do so. Until 1891, we were a pirate nation.”
Exhibit (B):“We are in the middle of something of a war here — what some call “the copyright wars”; what the late Jack Valenti called his own “terrorist war,” where the “terrorists” are apparently our kids. But if I asked you to shut your eyes and think about these “copyright wars,” your mind would not likely run to artists like Girl Talk or creators like Stephanie Lenz. Peer-to-peer file sharing is the enemy in the “copyright wars.” Kids “stealing” stuff with a computer is the target. The war is not about new forms of creativity, not about artists making new art.”