I have read a little about the new Stop Online Piracy Act bill and it seems disturbing. Just with a letter or a compliant by someone they could threaten any site. They cant take it down per say but it may as well have if they can force google and any search engine to remove the said site with just a letter, cut the site from its ad revenue. And there seems to be more to it than that but its above my feeble understanding of how the web works. BUt they can all do this without any judge being involved or finding anyone guilty. They dont have to prove the site did anything wrong, only that they think so. After that there is nothing anyone can do about it even if their wrong.
BigCloset TopShelf
TopShelf TG Fiction in the BigCloset!
The Hatbox
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will the new proposed billa SOPA affect this site if it becomes
Depends on the actuual wording of bill. but likely will close this site if passed.
May Your Light Forever Shine
May Your Light Forever Shine
Yeah probably
But I wonder if Erin monitors everything posted so closely that it wont affect this site. Hopefully thats the case. I hope its not passed as it goes way too far. The bill has some powerful enemies but it has some powerful people pushing the bill too. Big name records company's and Hollywood support it. Go figure lol.
WIsh they would pass a bill like this aimed at sites with malware. Im so sick of that that I hardly surf anymore. Just go on a site and you got a trojan loaded without knowing it or able to stop it from loading. But I guess no one cares about shutting down those sites. they just care about sites stealing their tradmarked or copyrighted material. Its all about money
like Stan said
depends on the wording, but then none of us are taking a book, word for word and putting our name on it. If I did, I've have these wonderful stories about a wizard in Chicago. But seriously, for places like this they'd have to word it just right. I mean look at all the fan-fic sites out there. That could shut them all down too.
No
Under current law, the fact that I do NOT monitor everything closely protects the website and me. Posters are responsible for content, I'm just responsible for taking things down that get complaints of certain sorts.
SOPA would change that somewhat and muddy the whole thing in a way that looks like an effort by IP industry types to be able to threaten sites they wish they could control. The end effect will be something no one can now foresee or predict. It might actually cause the end of ANY effective IP protection because the most onerous cost of enforcement of these rules would land on ISPs who might just rebel and countersue the IP industry associations. Anyone who wants to get into a slugging contest with ATT, Verizon and Comcast (three of the four biggest) has to be insane. And the last of the big four is Time-Warner who would have to give themselves a black-eye.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
From what I read, no actual
From what I read, no actual copyright infringement has to occur. Someone doesn't like a site, and issues a accusation. The ISP (or paypal, etc.) has to take down the site (within 5 days of notification is stated in the bill). No judge or jury, or even no real violation has to occur. Just the mere accusation.
URL to the text of the bill if anyone can translate the legalese into normal English.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3261:
--Brandon Young
--Brandon Young
As best as I can make it
As best as I can make it out, the accuser must be able to establish that willful violation of intellectual property rights has occurred. All well and good, but that would be after the fact, and the penalties for false accusation don't sound all that terrifying. The bill calls for considerable infrastructure being established to manage things, but makes no mention of where funding will come from, which means it will be at the expense of some existing program.
Folks, you're worrying about the wrong sites. I don't really see anyone coming after Big Closet, but YouTube, on the other hand, and various internet radio stations (unless they are paying proper royalties for broadcast) such as last.fm, they could get hit hard. Various torrent sites might be targeted. They are much more interested in those providing copies of their work illegally, than purveyors of fan fiction, which is derivative. Software piracy, illegal copies of movies and music, that type of thing. This is aimed at the significant loss of revenues due to illegal release of product, such as when a movie gets released onto the internet without authorization prior to release in the theatres.
This is not to say someone might not target BC for fan fiction, but this legislation isn't really dealing with derivative works; fan fiction does not result in a loss of revenue, this legislation is targeted at those who cause a loss of revenue.
Yours,
JohnBobMead
Yours,
John Robert Mead
Well, we already know that
Samirah M. Johnstone
Some stories which create "Fan-Fiction" and those which use...
..."borrowed" images *might* trigger a complaint, but there are fairly simple ways to avoid the issue for stories, and perhaps a good incentive for encouraging artists to avoid the image problem by creating original art.
Copyrights and Trademarks protect "intellectual property," but not ideas as such. As long as one's wonderful female superheroine isn't called Wonder Woman or Supergirl, there's little they can do about any of a thousand variations on the theme. Wonder Woman herself is "copied" from a thousand tropes, including Hercules, Artemis, Medea, and Atalanta, all of whom are in the public domain.
Even the "Retcon" stories could be "sanitised" through changing all the names globally, and probably by removing all non-original art.
I am not a lawyer, but every author and editor deals with copyright issues, and it's fairly easy to keep one's stories "clear" of infringing material as long as one does one's own work and doesn't "borrow" images.
On the other hand, the law as written is a gross assault upon free speech and the rule of law, since sites are presumed guilty unless they're well-funded enough to immediately launch counterclaims in Federal Courts.
Here's a discussion: SOPA
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Art
Although creating original art is the ideal solution, it's not too hard to find art created by others on the web that is licensed as free to redistribute and modify (by some definitions, resizing / lightly cropping an image counts as modification) as long as attribution / copyright notices / links back to the original site are included as well. Particularly if the image is found at a site like DeviantArt, if the artist hasn't made clear what their policy is on such matters, it doesn't hurt to drop them an email to ask. Many will probably be happy for it to be reused as long as due credit is given.
Attribution of course means crediting the original artist, not simply putting words to the effect of "Found on an image search" or linking to images dot google!
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't...
As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!
Let's not get crazy about SOPA
My gosh you folks are generating enough tension on this to launch a moon rocket.
I know that some people have been attacking 1st ammendment rights for a long time, but these things have to go through two houses and be signed by the president
OTOH, just about everyone I know has some pirated music or something. A while back, a bunch of authors here had their work stolen and posted on porn sites. I think that the only thing that has saved me is that I do not write porny stuff.
G
I'm crazy about SOPA
Sopa-PILLAS, that is! Wish I had one fresh out of the oven, right now. MMmmmmmmm...
http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=image...
Well shit, I guess it really CAN happen here..,
.
OH Yum!
They look so good. I want one. :)
Gwendolyn
plagiarism not piracy
There may be some plagiarism on this site, but I have yet to see Dan Browns Lost Symbols or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. So I think this site is fairly safe unless Erin starts posting movies like Normal and Tootsie (amazing how they star the same actor) I think we will be safe. Also, since this is a free site I doubt Erin is in any trouble and though I know some with bondage fantasies may be disappointed, we will not see her in handcuffs (though I am sure if you ask real nicely or throw a lot of money her way she can arrange for some photos). So lets relax and get off our SOPA boxes (couldn't resist).
K.T. Leone
My fiction feels more real than reality
Katie Leone (Katie-Leone.com)
Writing is what you do when you put pen to paper, being an author is what you do when you bring words to life
Ludicrous Waste of Time
SOPA (which I believe means "soup" in Spanish) is a witches' cauldron brewed up by some seriously learning-disabled witches.
The motivation behind it is to stop unauthorized streaming of copyrighted music and video. The effects it would have (if passed and signed) are anything but. The braintrust behind the measure doesn't seem to understand how the internet works, something about which many bright 12-year-olds have a better grasp.
As I understand it (and I refuse to read the actual text as I'm sure it would just raise my blood pressure), the "enforcement" mechanism centers around striking the website's name from the DNS servers of domestic ISPs. This doesn't make the allegedly offending servers go away. It just means, if you're in the U.S., you can't use your ISP's DNS server to automagically look up the IP address for you when you type in the name of the server you'd like to visit. The actual server is still there.
Once upon a time(like a couple of years ago), the U.S. controlled all the root servers of the World Wide Web (the root servers are the ones that control the propagation of all the name & address translations that get sent to DNS servers). I don't think that's true anymore, but whether it is or isn't, whoever is writing this brilliant piece of legislation doesn't seem to understand that internet users are not locked into using their ISPs DNS servers. You can change a couple settings and use any DNS servers on the planet, including ones which will never be within this legislation's jurisdiction.
Throw in the fact that a growing cadre of users support and use anonymous proxy servers to access sites, and this bit of legislative buffoonery looks both desperate and silly.
And, lest we forget, BitTorrent. And the old-school method, news server binaries.
Other than tear up the internet, or track all traffic and sue everyone, unauthorized streaming media is going to be remarkably difficult to stop.
And even if they succeeded, it wouldn't stop unlicensed usage of non-streaming entertainment media. You'd have to close all the libraries and stop the manufacture of any recordable media capable of holding a copy of anything.
Good luck with that, learning-disabled legislative witches.
___________________
I was hoping to get mellower as I aged. It's not working.
Are we fearful due to our own guilt?
Back in the old days, "50s and 60s, I read a great deal of Sci Fi, and in doing so, I noticed that those writers sort of exchanged ideas and used each other's plot devices. That was pre-PC, so rapid dissemination of pirated goods was hard.
Now days, some call the same thing plagiarism.
I'd just be careful that I did not use anyone else's ideas. And, yes a lot of the ret-con stuff, and things from comic books might disappear. I'm sure we'll adapt one way or the other.
My brother, spends a lot of time ranting about Social Security, the Republicans, and the terrorists. What a waste of time, I think.
G
BUt they can all do this
Remember this kinda shit from history class back in school. We had it in my country like 65 years ago. In the eastern parts of it even till 1989. Turned out it doesn't work. - But meanwhile, just to make the picture perfect, your politicians maybe should get themselves some black leather coats and red armbands or something like that.
------------
"Die Gedanken sind frei / Sie fliegen vorbei
Kein Mensch kann sie wissen / Kein Jäger sie schießen
Mit Kugeln und Blei / Die Gedanken sind frei"
------------
"Die Gedanken sind frei / Sie fliegen vorbei
Kein Mensch kann sie wissen / Kein Jäger sie schießen
Mit Kugeln und Blei / Die Gedanken sind frei"
Dumb
It appears to me that without recourse, the people who will be the most at risk will be the Big Record Companies, the big providers of literature and music on the network, the big companies. How many people are pissed off at them at any one time?
Complain about the AT&T website and they will have to lose it? Right...
Netflix, Amazon, Comcast, Itunes, how would they survive with as many complainers out there as they already have? If people knew that they could get make their lives difficult by just lodging a complaint, how long would they last?
Wholeman
Yes, the weird author with the boob fetish.
Yes, the weird author with the boob fetish.