If you’re like me and woke up feeling rather clueless because you couldn’t tell the difference between a SOPA and a PIPA so you went to Wikipedia to get some info and found a black page with the ominous message that the Intrawebs as you know them will be forever damaged but why should you care because you’re not living in the USA and have never had a congressthingy to write to…
…the following video lays the issues out very clearly.
I was going to join the wordpress.com bandwagon and black out this humble blog for a day of protest, but unlike them and other heavyweights like Wikipedia, I’d rather have a laugh instead.
This guy’s kind of out of tune, but he’s funny:
Like this:
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The banner photograph shows the town of Britannia Beach, BC, Canada, where I grew up. It's home. But I don't live there anymore.
Very persuasive videos.
And now somehow I feel guilty for having blogged today.
Just checked into Twitter and discovered a new term’s been coined and is trending – SOPAthetic. Rather good, actually.
Despite the seriousness of it all, there’s a lot about this that’s going to call for popcorn in the next little while. The Hollywood moguls are seriously torqued at O for withdrawing his support of SOPA/PIPA in order to placate the Silicon Valley sorts – now Hollywood says no more campaign cash. Etc. and so on.
Me? I’m going to download all my favorite youtubes onto a flash drive and keep my library card up to date, while the pols fight it out. Some of those guys still think file sharing is handing a pile of manila folders to their office-mate.
Did either of you catch the part where the explanatory video talks about Google being forced to take down a clip of a little kid dancing because of the music playing in the background?
That happens in Germany all the time thanks to GEMA, the tentacular mass governing music rights in this country. On every vinyl record sold here, you’ll find GEMA’s stamp, ensuring that the artists got paid. Of course I’m not against giving artists their due, but these days they over-reach all the time.
A teacher friend in Canada send me a video of a project his kids had worked on. I guess there was music overlaid on parts of it, but I’ll never know, because GEMA blocked YouTube over content issues.
People here have developed ways to get around GEMA, but I’m not such a high consumer of online video to make it worth my while.
Of course, the second video is EXACTLY the kind of thing SOPA is meant to stamp out. Who owns the rights to the melody?
What if we call it satire? Isn’t that fair game? I can’t sing or play an instrument, but I change lyrics around for laughs – just like Weird Al, only for a lot less financial reward.
What about Weird Al, anyway? Do you suppose he pays the original author(s) a royalty?
Well, here we go. US government shuts down MegaUpload, Anonymous begins huge DDOS attack.
Got popcorn?
Saw that. I’ve nothing against shutting down file-sharing sites as long as that’s all they do. I mean, come on. It’s only a couple of bucks to rent a film. File-sharing to get around paying for a film is theft. It’s when they start to try to stamp out EVERYTHING that even has a background noise from a song, that’s when it gets ridiculous.
i like the first video, the second one not so much. Never been a fan of that song anyway.