SOPA Resistance Day begins at Ars Technica
Piracy is an emotional issue, but it’s important to note what it is not: a war between the “creators” and the “technologists.” Ars Technica lives or dies by our content and its copyright. So does publisher Tim O’Reilly. So does musician Peter Gabriel. Yet all of us oppose SOPA. It’s time for supporters of SOPA and SOPA-like legislation to drop the conveniently facile caricatures they have of their opponents. Millions of us believe in intellectual property as a fair concept that can have an important place in our society. And for a subset of us, it’s our intellectual property that’s at risk, anyway.
There’s room to build a reasonable consensus for dealing with the “worst of the worst” online. But that means going back to the drawing board and bringing the tech community and Internet users to the table beforelegislation is drafted. Creating a sudden “emergency” around the issue and using only the perspective of the biggest rightsholders as a starting point is no way to legislate on key Internet issues—and band-aid patches to such a flawed approach aren’t going to fix that.
SOPA needs to be stopped—and then we can start the hyperbole-free conversation that the content industries and the White House both say they want.
Nicely stated post by Ars Technica, which already has gone dark (with a snappy theme, I must say) in protest of SOPA.
