Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012

SOPA, so what?

Kent Kimes, Weekly Surge Editor

 

SOPA, so what?

I’ll admit I was a little late to the party.

I didn’t hear of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) until a week or so before last week’s Internet black-out, when Wikipedia and other popular sites went dark in protest.

Then there’s SOPA’s cousin, PIPA – no, not the Duchess of Cambridge’s hottie sister, but a related piece of legislation known as the Protect IP Act.

These pieces of now-tabled legislation were Congress’ ham-fisted attempts to crack down on online piracy and protect intellectual property – a good idea in theory, but botched by a bunch of codgers who don’t even know how to send their own e-mail.

As a generator of original content, I am against Internet pirating in any form.

And Weekly Surge’s parent owner, the McClatchy Co., naturally supports the fight to protect its content. “We should be able to create our content and get all the value we can without people just being able to lift it and make a business out of work which we have paid for,” said Christian A. Hendricks, the company’s vice president for interactive media, in a story published by McClatchy’s Washington Bureau on Jan. 18.

I never illegally download music or movies as tempting as it may be in these difficult economic times – although I did do this a little bit back in the day before Napster was originally shut down. But I haven’t done it since I got an iPod and because so much music is available for listening or streaming either on an artist’s site, Reverbnation, Youtube, and yes, even the antiquated MySpace.

I don’t think much about it if I recall something from the past and want to post it on Facebook as a lark. For instance, on Tuesday, I ate some cereal for breakfast that made my stomach rumble, so it made me think of the classic “Saturday Night Live” commercial for the ultra-fiber treat Colon Blow, I found it on Hulu, and then posted in on my Facebook page.

All disgusting fun.

But if SOPA or PIPA had gone through, I could have faced legal action for posting a copyrighted piece of intellectual property.

Whoa!

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Luckily, Congress took a step back and tabled the proposed bills after an overwhelming onslaught of protests from the Internet community – perhaps the first tangible example of the Web flexing its collective muscle and power.

But if you know anything about politics and the influence of money – then you know this thing’s not dead yet. The movie and recording industry didn’t pay a bunch of lobbyists to have nothing happen.

But what does it mean to us in a li’l ol’ coastal resort town?

For starters, we know of a couple of local Internet-based businesses that joined in the SOPA/PIPA protest, and we know that Horry County’s federal legislative delegation can be a factor, if we let ‘em know how we feel.

I figured the average reader and Joe Myrtle Beach Internet User might not be fully aware of what’s at stake and what the SOPA/PIPA fuss is all about, so I began thinking about how we could foster the dialog in the form of our weekly cover stories. It’s a decidedly complicated web and there’s a wealth of info and data out there to synthesize. But I piqued the interest of Lee Newman, co-creator of the online comic book/music publisher, www.swampfoxmedia.com, who contributed to our Hangover Helper cover story published Dec. 29, and he set about tracking down the ins-and-outs of SOPA/PIPA and interpreting the salient points of the proposed legislation to see what it means on a local level.

It was a rapidly developing story - one that seemed to change daily - and was hard to put together for a weekly publication because of this, but I think Newman (it is his first cover assignment for Surge) did a valiant job, and you can judge for yourself by clicking on this week’s cover story on our homepage.