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A Few Last Thoughts On SOPA/PIPA From Last Week

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After sleeping 13 hours on Friday night and then 14 hours last night it’s pretty clear that a week like last week isn’t sustainable for me. At brunch today, Amy guessed that I worked 80 hours between Monday and Friday, ran three days (after coming off a double long weekend where I did two 10 mile runs), travelled from Boston to NY and then NY to Boston late at night, and generally wore myself out.

I’m heading out for a 15 mile run in Boston and expect I’ll be garbage collecting all the random thoughts from the week. The backdrop in my world was dealing with SOPA/PIPA, which I’m glad is dead, for now. Based on all the rhetoric over the weekend, I have no doubt that it’ll be back soon as an issue and/or woven into some other bill that seems totally innocuous. Regardless, the experience around this over the last few months has impacted me pretty profoundly – both in my disdain for politics as usual, liars, and ass covering as well as my pride for grassroots leadership and the power of the Internet and the Web to get the word out and engage people.

I hope to spend zero minutes on this topic this upcoming week, although I put that in the fantasy category as I’m sure reality will interject itself. In the mean time, I encourage you to go take a look at a few more posts just to cement in your mind what is going on so you can be prepared for the next wave of it.

Joel Spolsky has two last things about SOPA/PIPA and then he will shut up. I hope he never does – he’s brilliant, articulate, and totally gets it. His two suggestions are to (1) use what we’ve learned to start lobbying for our own laws and (2) figure out a way to shift political ad dollars from TV to the web. It’s free to advertise on YouTube – let’s force it to be free to advertise on NBC, or at least so prohibitively expensive on a relative basis that it’s not worth it.

H.R. 1981 - Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 – has embedded in it an amendment that’ll have your internet service provider tracking all of your financial dealings online. And yes, the sponsor of this is Lamar Smith, the same guy who sponsored SOPA. I wonder how many more bills there are out there like this – I certainly have no time or bandwidth to deal with them since I’m trying to help create the future.

Does Online Piracy Hurt The Economy? A Look At The Numbers. Here is some empirical evidence in Forbes that it doesn’t.

If Congress wants jobs, it can’t want SOPA. Talking point #1 for SOPA/PIPA morphed into “piracy costs jobs.” Over the course of last week, there were many people who were polite against being against piracy (for example, I am), but I don’t know of one who said “but piracy actually costs jobs and I can prove it.” I’ve concluded the piracy costs jobs thing is classic talking point rhetoric – if we hear it enough times then it must be true. Wouldn’t it be ironic if there was actually net job growth based on the dynamics of the current content economy?

If you were involved in opposing SOPA/PIPA recently, thank you for your efforts. These were horrible bills at some many levels and they needed to be shut down. The cynic in me knows that this is far from over but for now I’m going to go for a run and try not to think about it too much.

January 22nd, 2012     Categories: Politics     Tags: , ,
  • http://www.3scalesolutions.net stevenwillmott

    I’m amazed at how much was achieved in such a short time to get the opposition vocal, visible and ultimately heard in the right places. No doubt it will morph and come back but it’s impressive what’s possible from people voting with their feet (leaving go daddy) to getting representative’s attention. 

    Huge props to you Brad for being one of those helping make this happen!

  • Nasir

    Brad, thanks for all you did.

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  • Ian Warner

    Thanks Brad.  This is like a battle between the Jedi and the Sith – there’s no end in sight.  There will continue to be a series of bills sponsored by the fortune 100 in an effort to stifle online innovation and milk profits without being creative.

    The next bill in the cross hairs is ACTA.

    Here’s a video:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=citzRjwk-sQ

    In the last few weeks I have made the front page of Reddit regarding SOPA and called three congressman regarding SOPA & PIPA.  Looks like it’s time to do it again.  It is mentally exhausting, but we need to acknowledge our victories as well.  

    It makes me think we are being continuously assaulted, tactically, hoping that we collectively close our eyes for just a moment to celebrate winning and in that lapse a bill will pass.  Perhaps the tactic is that people will begin to think we are crying wolf and that a lack of muster will be raised, and a bill will pass.  Who knows.

    How many fucking bills are there?  No matter.  If this is war, the number one thing to protect are comm lines, and that is what is being targeted.  Looks like it’s time to keep on winning.

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  • Rich

    Glad to see you’re happy about SOPA/PIPA. It was best to just wait.