User blog:Sidorak12814/Slew of Obsessive Political Activists

That's my new version of the SOPA acronym. Like it?

Anyway, so there's this new bill that the US Congress, in all their international renown and infallible wisdom, has taken up into consideration.

By the way, I was joking about the renown and wisdom thing.

At any rate, this bill will affect the laws involving Internet piracy, making the infringement penalties more severe and naming the act of unauthorized streaming of copyrighted material, like on most of YouTube, a crime.

Now, see, this may seem fine on the outside, but to a former participant in the Christian Communicators of America debate tournaments and someone who is good at finding holes in arguments, it has a few problems.

The first and foremost is that it has no provisions for increasing the number of piracy cases taken action against. It doesn't increase the number of prosecutions or the security procedures against piracy. All it really does is make the punishment worse. However, the other half of it, making the actual stealing harder is taken care of by PIPA.

The second is that, in many cases, actually in most cases on YouTube and similar websites, the streamers are not making any money off the material. A good example is a "Let's Play," a common type of video series on YouTube. The video maker takes videos of himself playing a video game and puts them on YouTube, free of charge on either end. No money transfer. Now, while he may be distributing material, that the public would normally have to pay to experience, he is not removing the joy of actually experiencing the game itself.

One might argue that creating a Let's Play, or LP, may expose the fact that a game is terrible and thus encourage people not to buy it.

If this is true, the company should be trying harder to make a better product.

But aside from that, a hole in the argument itself: If someone likes a game enough to do an LP on it, then he is basically giving the product free advertising by making the LP in the first place.

And there are a slew of other arguments against this bill as well, some more pressing, but I just felt I had to expose the lame logic behind it.

Now, PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, actually aims to make the stealing of copyright material harder, which is perfectly fine and more important issue than the increasing of punishments. I would probably have no problem with SOPA and PIPA if there were not the clause in the former about making YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikia illegal.

I know that's not what the bill actually proposes, but that's what will ultimately happen.

One will notice that I just mentioned most of the biggest and most useful sites on the Internet, and most of the ones that people spend the most time on.

Yeah, I noticed that, too. Apparently the writers of SOPA did not.

Anyway, thus concludes my logical takedown of SOPA's most controversial clause. Hope it enlightened you. If I got any of my facts wrong, take it up with Wikipedia.

Sidorak 1  2  8  1  4  19:54, January 16, 2012 (UTC)