TED Talk Video On SOPA And PIPA Makes It All Crystal Clear
The result of groups across the web making an effort to bring the damaging effects of SOPA and PIPA to light has been a nice cross-section of explanatory posts made to educate the masses, and what we've got here is a TED talk video of Clay Shirky taking all of that and making it so clear your grandmother could understand it. The video in this post has Shirky, a man who goes by many names, American writer, teacher, consultant, and specialists on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He knows his stuff, he's very well spoken, and this is the video that'll make it clear for you why SOPA and PIPA are beyond dangerous, they're absolutely unacceptable.
What Shirky says here is that this isn't the first time the big names in the media industry have tried to stop us, the public, from sharing and creating our own media. What they'd like, and that these bills and bills of the past have tried to do, as he'll explain, is bring us back to the ideal age for them, when televisions and radios were what we sat in front of and consumed, and that's it. Everything from video tapes to xerox copy machines to the newest weapons of sharing, downloads and streaming video, these are things that the groups producing and otherwise selling the media you consume would have stomped out and destroyed.
If SOPA and PIPA pass, you will be guilty until proven innocent. Because groups like YouTube cannot by any realistic means afford to police each and every person who submits videos to their site, they'd have to shut down uploads by you, and would only be able to show videos they upload themselves that have been pre-approved by the owners of said media. Tumblr, WordPress, essentially every message board in the world, and more, will be under the gun should SOPA and PIPA pass, simply because they do not have the legal means to stop the wave of taketown notices that would pummel them.
Watch that video, see what you think. Also check our timeline below for the rest of the SOPA and PIPA related news and columns.