Last Word on SOPA/PIPA for a While

Gratifying that yesterday's internet protest made our lawmakers stop and think - including my own Senator John Cornyn.  Thank you, sir, for reconsidering your support for this flawed bill.

(My email last week persuaded him, gotta be.)

I'm not political, but this proposed legislation irritated me.  Shooting gnats with a canon.  Much as I love movies and want films made and profitable - heck! I've made one myself! - I do think internet film piracy in this country is pretty much a gnat.  (China?  A different matter.)  There has to be a way to reduce piracy without messing up the internet... which is the frontier of our time.

Hey! You, film industry!  The MPAA's claim that yesterday was just big internet bullies like Google misleading us dopey little people into protest?  Wrong.  Whiny.  See me?  Grassroots!  Dirt between my toes.

I got involved when it dawned on me that it is my internet too.  Laaaate adopter here, non-tech, born too soon to ever be a native citizen of the World Wide Web...  Yet I email, I Google, I love Wikipedia, I blog and read bloggers, I have websites, I've even written an e-book sold on the internet and made a minuscule amount of money off the www.  I don't use the street in front of my house as much as I use this new-fangled invention.

So I care.

Public domain images (Clkr & Wikipedia) messed with

Please keep that fact in mind, Congress and Big Entertainment Biz.

Addendums:
HERE's a link to a nicely articulated TED talk - an explaination of why SOPA/PIPA are dangerous to internet freedom and our constitutional rights.
And HERE is a fascinating and very even-handed explanation of why SOPA is wrong-headed, written by a Hollywood film editor.  It's the best summation I've seen.