Vox Media, SB Nation Take Official Stance Against SOPA, PIPA

I own my avatar, but manraj stole that lizard.

The only thing I could possibly think of you referring to is when Fooch randomly links to that Ice Cube song. We pay for the images we use and the videos during the game are not copyright for certain uses.

My supporting of this has nothing to do with Niners Nation or Vox Media at all. I didn’t even know Vox was going to post anything about this until I woke up this morning and saw it. I tweeted last night that if I were in charge, I’d black out NN in protest, thinking that they weren’t even going to come out in support of this.

Instead of acting like the specific information you’re referring to is hard to understand, you can simply look up one of the five million guides that easily explain SOPA. Asking how it can affect websites when it’s blatantly obvious is just you being purposefully ignorant to be confrontational. Sure, its a hard bill to get when you read one or two lines about it, like I said above, but there’s plenty of easy-read guides.

If you choose to be ignorant of the bill, that’s fine. I’m going to go and continue to call my representatives and ensure that my freedoms aren’t infringed upon. I don’t want a censored web.

There are issues of Fair Use that allow for using other people’s content without their permission. Fair use is an essential part of the Internet experience and coming after me for providing commentary and analysis on copyrighted materials is one of the issues. The vagueness and overbreadth provides the opportunity for them to come after me.

For example, when we post videos of plays and provide analysis, that is employing Fair Use doctrine to copyrighted material. I think it is perfectly reasonable to use such material if I am trying to explain a play or discuss a given situation.

While this bill does not mean the Internet will suddenly be locked up, it does provide the tools to crack down in ways that I believe are unfair to the user experience.

I just think there is a dissonance between what is appropriate given the way other businesses are regulated, copyright, property (physical and intellectual and virtual) and this appeal to generic self satisfying slogans like “freedom of speech” and an “open internet”. I concede that I may be missing something, but what I do know is that the appeals against it don’t add up. I’m not supporting the bill or anything, I’m supporting the general principle of what (at least some of what) this bill is trying to do, even though it may be inconvenient to me as an internet user. Google and Wiki make these appeals to freedom etc. which is BS. They simply don’t want to lose out on $$$ and traffic . And I aint a capitalist. There is way too much freedom in terms of “sharing” “info” on the internet and people don’t want that gravy train to end. If the general consensus was “we don’t like this bill for X, Y and Z, but we do believe some sort of regulation/enforcement is necessary to uphold certain copyright laws etc.” then I don’t really have any beef.

They’ll stamp their feet and whine and complain and black out their own sites in protest — but physical exertion?? Let’s not go overboard.