Commercial Break. SOPA and PIPA.

As you may have noticed, OCTV looked a little different today.

Who? What? Where am I?

And you may also be asking: Why?

Currently, the US House of Representitives has legislation called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) while the Senate has its own version called Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). While stopping online piracy and protecting intellectual property sound like noble things, these bills are not noble. In fact, they do three things:

1. Infringe on the First Amendment that guarantees free speech.
2. Create security risks to the Internet by removing new security features like DNSSEC.
3. Provide one-sided justice by removing due process from alleged infringement cases.

And all this because some entrenched, legacy businesses don’t want to innovate and update their business models. The biggest supporters of SOPA/PIPA are the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). They have decided instead of using the internet to get their content to fans as conveniently and economically as possible, they want to punish fans by maintaining things like DVDs and release windows. Just silly.

I’ll get into all this further, but I wanted to provide you some information on actions you can take to help out. Go to the following link:

http://americancensorship.org/

They have all the information needed to contact your Senator and Representative. Additionally, if you scroll down the page, there is information on contacting the US State Department if you are one of the numerous Canadians wandering around Off-Colour TV, eh.

So let’s dig a little deeper and see how SOPA/PIPA could affect OCTV.

One of the highlights around OCTV lately has been the GIF posts by HBC. Some might say they are magical. In the legal realm, they are called fair use. Under SOPA/PIPA, doing so might be legal, but for the company that hosts our blog, they might not want to take the risk and can just shut down the blog. That is much easier than the legal legwork required to clear our blog of any accusations.

Another way it could affect OCTV is that we allow pretty much anyone to comment on the site. You guys don’t see much of it, but we get a LOT of spam. Penis enlargement and fake Louis Vuitton bags. You know what those have in common? They are products that are being targeted by SOPA/PIPA. We usually catch the links before the post, but if we didn’t – BAM – no more OCTV. Then we would have to make all of you register and log in to post comments. What a hassle.

Finally, we use OCTV as a form of expression of our feelings of love, hate, passion, and rage about TV. If we are not allowed to do that, we have lost our voice in the world. We want to empower ourselves and our readers to speak out and make connections to those who love and hate the same things. We want to invite dialog and debate. SOPA/PIPA do nothing to further that goal and have the possibility of actually killing it.

To wrap things up, here is my personal favorite article on exactly why SOPA/PIPA are a bad idea from Tech Dirt:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111122/04254316872/definitive-post-why-sopa-protect-ip-are-bad-bad-ideas.shtml

If you have any questions or want to let everyone know of other ways they can help, post in the comments!