Hey! Remember the artists!
The frenzy attacking legislation known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) has Wikipedia closed down today and Google's homepage showing a censored logo. Right now the overwhelmingly dominant voices in the media oppose the acts.
I am 100% in favor of protecting intellectual property rights of artists, authors, musicians and adding teeth to copyright enforcement. In all the current anti-censorship fury, I don't want the copyright concept to be drowned out. The art publishing and licensing industries continue to be plagued by illegal rip-offs, meaning we are not being paid and our artists are not being paid.
Do SOPA and PIPA go too far? Probably. They put too much authority in government to declare who is or isn't legit, and expose websites to excess liability even when they act in good faith to remove infringing material.
Watching, reading and hearing the news, I think that SOPA and PIPA are DOA for now. But I hope that efforts to beef up copyright protection continue and we raise consciousness of artists' rights.
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