As many of you who come to my site may have noticed, as well as go to social blogging sites like Tumblr, 4Chan and The Daily What, that there has been a lot of talk about SOPA and you may not know much about it, or have heard a lot of misinformation about it. So here is the skinny and why I am protesting against it.

First off, despite what a lot of people may be stressing about, SOPA will not shut off the Internet, however, it could open the door to really heavy censorship on the web for US residents.

SOPA is a bill that is currently being debated in the US Congress as an action against piracy of copyrighted materials such as books, movies and music. The idea behind the bill is that since shutting down sites that allow downloads of these things don't seem to be working, that the way to stop piracy is to basically 'shut out' sites that have copyrighted content on them, including streaming. Rather than giving cease and desist orders and forcing sites to simply take down this infringing material, it would mean that the entire website would get blocked. Primarily, this is to tackle repeat offenders like torrent sites and sites like MangaFox, but it also affects any site that has unauthorized copyrighted material posted by a user. Anything from a signature to a blog's background song and so on. So instead of having a Youtube video inaccessible, it would mean all of Youtube would get blocked.

And because the language of the bill is too vague, it would also mean that sites that link to copyrighted material could be construed as streaming and get blocked. This means all the power of the internet would essentially fall to big corporations that hold lots of copyrighted material, because it primarily applies to material where the licensing fee would be over $2500.

Of course, news sites, parody sites and educational sites would be exempt because of prior fair use laws-provided that these sites are only for fair use material and that users of the site don't go outside those bounds (hypothetically a school's site could still get shut down if in the forums one student shares a link to a streaming or torrent site). But huge chunks of sites and blogs could be subject to SOPA's interpretations.

But piracy is bad, isn't it? It means that hardworking artists who create material don't see a penny for their intellectual property, wouldn't be good if these sites got severally punished, as well as the people who use them? Well, there is piracy and there is piracy. There are groups from China and the Middle East who torrent entire company's catalogs for free, or sites like MangaFox that act like De Facto publishers, posting work that is already licensed and make huge profits on ad revenue with almost no cost to themselves (and no money for the original creators). And then there are those groups of loving fans who do things like fansubs, AMVs, lipsynchs and other fanworks that we on the internet that use copyrighted materials and also don't pay for it. And these are the people who are primarily going to get hurt. This won't stop the bad kind of piracy, since it doesn't shut down bad sites, just blocks them. While not all companies are A**holes, and don't bother with going after things like 5-second movies or Brony Tshirts, a lot of companies are notorious for coming down with the wrath of hell on things like the Girl Scouts singing Happy Birthday.

As an artist, designer and fan, I am very much against this bill. It won't benefit the creators, on the companies who hold copyrights. While I don't want my work exploited or stolen, I love fan art and fan media. And because of many of my affiliates, or my Doujin series, I could potentially become a victim of this too.

For more information go to: http://americancensorship.org/