Thanks for the question. Touched on this briefly in yesterday's question, but I think it's worth expanding on.
As you've probably heard, several sites (including Wikipedia and Reddit) are blacking out on Wednesday to protest SOPA and PIPA. (No, not the Middleton sister.) You can read more about the dangers of the bills passing here and also here.
Here's the thing: of course you shouldn't steal movies and TV shows online. Some people think that movies and TV should be free, and they're wrong. The people who make their living in the creative arts need to get paid, and copyright holders have the right to protect their intellectual property. That said, SOPA and PIPA are going about this in the worst possible way.
Because of the haphazard wording of the bills, they in essence give Hollywood studios the right to shut down sites, get them blacklisted from Google, get advertisers to drop them and more just for posting copyright material. There's a huge difference between the guy who steals Sherlock Holmes 2 on PirateBay and the webmaster who posts the trailer on his movie news site or the YouTuber who makes a funny mash-up of Robert Downey Jr. one-liners. But with SOPA, there won't be much distinction. As many have pointed out, under SOPA, Justin Bieber would be guilty of copyright infringement for the covers of Usher songs posted to YouTube that made him famous.
Of course Hollywood should be able to protect their intellectual properties, and it's hard to excuse torrent sites that exist for the sole purpose of trading copyrighted material. But the SOPA and PIPA bills are severely misguided and show a basic misunderstanding about how the Internet works. (Even Obama is against them.) Many GuySpeak-ers make their living on the Internet, and SOPA's strident wording could affect our livelihood. The movie industry needs to realize that the way we share information has changed. Look at a TV show like Community that thrives with an active online fan base that shares animated GIFs of the cast and remixes video clips. Just as the music industry had to adapt to MP3s, so do movies and TV to new streaming technologies, torrents and the fact that fans show their love for the pop culture that they love by posting remixing, and adding their stamp to copyrighted material.
The PIPA vote is today. Supposedly SOPA talks could resume in Feburary. Go here to find out how you can protest SOPA and PIPA.
as a freelance copywriter I also make a large part of my living online, and *sigh* I agree.
Defeating SOPA and PIPA is important, but the assault on liberty in the US is far from over.
As if SOPA and PIPA aren't bad enough, we still have to worry about a very intrusive ISP retention bill, known as the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (obviously the name chosen to make any opponent of this bill to appear to support pedophiles!), right now on the backburner, but also threatens to be passed this year. If it passes, everything Americans do online, will be logged and stored by the ISP for 2 years, we're not just talking URLs, full deep packet monitoring and logging. Aside from being more intrusive than even China, if you do any banking or use credit cards online, all that will be stored and accessible to hackers. Oh, under this act, all your information is suppose to be accessible by any law enforcement or government agency, WITHOUT WARRANTS. The SOPA/PIPA issue has hogged the news lately, but this bill is not dead yet. I wouldn't be surprised if SOPA/PIPA were a diversion to get this bill passed!
To reviewed by the Supreme Court as a result of a criminal case, the US DoJ insists that it can, again without a warrant, log, record, and access the GPS position data every cell phone with GPS, of every American. Fortunately in this case, early remarks from the Justices suggest DoJ will lose this one.
I personally question Obama's sincerity on SOPA. He was suspiciously silent on the bill in the beginning, it was only when public outcry grew loud enough that it might affect his reelection did he make a statement.