SOPA/PIPA – huh? Obama doesn't like it, right?

NOTE: Mindblowingly awesome and stunningly helpful inforgraphic after the jump. Did I mention its fantabulousness? No really, it’ll totally clear up any confusion you have. (Just click “continuing reading,” dammit!)

Quick update: The best action you can take to oppose any pending legislation, of course, is to contact your US Representative & Senators – Wikipedia has set up a page where all you have to do is plug in your zip-code and you’ll get all the information you need - click here. I may have to show Wikipedia more respect in the future.

If you’re like me, there’s a lot of information that flies by you on a daily basis, information that half-registers, or semi-registers, and which you know you should know more about, but about which you know little.

And if you’re further like me, sometimes you have time to actually learn more about these snippets of information, and most of the time — you don’t.

Such it has been for me with regard to two bills pending in the US House of Representatives and Senate, known (respectively) by the acronyms SOPA and PIPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. For instance: I didn’t know that SOPA and PIPA were two versions of the same thing until about 30 seconds before I started typing this post.

On the other hand, though, sources that I trust (Boing Boing and Skepchick, for instance, as well as a metric ton of other folks on the left-hand side of the Internet dial) have been fighting the good fight against these bills for sometime, and the White House itself announced its opposition the other day (saying that “the important task of protecting intellectual property online must not threaten an open and innovative internet”), so I have had a vague but well-sourced sense that I, too, should be opposed to SOPA and PIPA. I mean, if President Obama is convinced, I’m pretty sure I should be sitting up and paying attention, right?

For one, I’ll never be a fan of censorship. For another, I don’t like broad, sledge-hammer approaches to problems that are as complex and affect as many people as does online distribution of content (not to mention anything that pretends to deal in one fell swoop with anything as amorphous as “content”). For a third – well, there really wasn’t a “third,” because I didn’t know what I was talking about.

So I have finally done a smidge-bit o’ learnin’, on the very eve of an internet blackout planned as a protest by numerous big content providers (such as Wikipedia. Which I don’t trust unless I already kinda-sorta know what I’m looking for and am just looking for confirmation or possible sources to explore further, but, heck, one doesn’t go to bat only for those websites one likes, I suppose), as well as many smaller ones (all the way from Boing Boing to individual cat enthusiasts with a tumblr account). Many other sites, such as Google, will be doing what Cory Doctorow at my beloved Boing Boing has termed “going semithermonuclear“:

Big news: although Google won’t be blacking out tomorrow in protest of SOPA and PIPA, they will have a homepage graphic and link protesting the laws: “Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet.”

Over at my personal blog, I suppose I’ll be going semithermonuclear, too, in that I’ll be putting a banner up (if I can figure out how), except that given my size,  it’ll be more like that little spark you see if you scuff your stocking-ed feet in the carpet in the dark come wintertime and then touch the light-switch. But, you know: Static zaps for the cause!

It should be noted that it looks like both bills may already be all but dead in the water – but as someone warned yesterday (I can no longer recall who… like I said: A lot of information flies by on a daily basis), that doesn’t mean the ideas are dead. It’s very likely that the powerful interests that support the bills in the business world (such as the Motion Picture Association of America and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp) and their supporters inside the halls of Congress will slice and dice the legislation and try to pass it in bits (after all, that’s what President Obama did when Congress wouldn’t pass the big jobs bill — it makes good legislative sense, if you really want something to pass). So, to the extent that you have bandwidth to keep these ideas on your radar, it might be a good idea to continue to do so.

Right! First up, this infographic, which sorted my brain and the various bits of disparate knowledge I had in it about these pieces of legislation in about 30 seconds flat (below it, you’ll find a few links to more information):

h/t Skepchick

Second up:

1. Here’s a good Scientific American piece about the ongoing controversy: SOPA Opera – White House Shuts Down Proposed Online Anti-Piracy Bill
2. Here’s friend-of-the-blog JM Ashby (of the accurately named Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog! Go!) writing about why SOPA (in its current incarnation, I suppose) is probably dead for good: SOPA Is Dead. Again.
3. Here’s the organization leading the online protests: American Censorship (you’ll find various ideas about how to participate in the protest tomorrow, such as how to go black, and how to protest without going black).
4. If you have a WordPress blog and want to participate in the blackout, they’ve provided a plug-in.
5. And here’s another source for website banners.

Bottom line, censorship is bad and while there is a very small handful of cases in which it might be genuinely necessary, such cases are few and far between. As someone who is trying to make her way in this crazy, topsy-turvy world of “no one pays you for almost anything you produce anymore,” I have real and very personal concern over the ease with which intellectual property gets bandied about these days without so much as a by-your-leave. But sweeping, badly-crafted, over-reaching legislation that would have a chilling effect on the exchange of information and creative development is just not the way to go. I’m hoping that tomorrow’s protests will be the nail in the SOPA/PIPA coffin.

Crossposted at Emily L. Hauser In My Head.