Will SOPA Help Some People?

The SOPA act (Stop Online Piracy Act, methinks (arrr…)) that is currently going through Congress is looming huge in the minds of people that produce content, such as myself. This bill could be an income killer… say… SOPA decides to shut down Yahoo! Voices or Squidoo because some idiot on the sight decided to upload something that was copyrighted. I think that these fears are legitimate, but we never know how things will work out in reality. I’m glad that I have material up on several different web sites.

The main people that I think that these laws are trying to target are web sites like Pirate Bay, who facilitate a lot of theft of copyrighted material. While ending blatant, purposeful theft is admirable, the law looks like it goes a little too far. However, if they soften this bill just a tad before publication, there is a small chance that this bill could help honest content producers. We’ll have to wait to see whether this will have a positive or a negative effect, but a podcast that I was listening to today made me realize that there could be some beneficial effects to honest people.

The podcast that I was listening to normally uses a song in its intro. They refer to a web site that visits other sites and cuts and pastes large sections of other people’s articles into it. All that is gone now. They have a new web site that has many links and shorter paragraphs describing the links. The podcast begins with some music that is not identifiable as any copyrighted song that I know of.

Since I set out to make money through content production, I’ve been pretty careful about not using other people’s copyrighted work without permission. I use a lot of Creative Commons work, a smattering of my own photos, and works that are in the public domain. On occasion, I do use an image under the “fair use” provision, such as when I’m writing about a company and use a logo. There have only been a few times that I have knowingly used copyrighted material without asking. I do my best to be honest.

As a result, I don’t have to change much if/when the upcoming law is passed. In addition, the people that at one time were cutting and pasting articles from other places now have to do exactly what I am doing, which puts us more on an even playing field.

There are many things that cannot be copyrighted. For example, you cannot copyright a list of ingredients, like what you would find in a recipe. Me and my lawyer-to-be husband had an argument about using a clownfish and a Dory-like fish in an aquarium together. The list of fish, I argued, cannot be copyrighted, but if you decided to arrange the tank like the one at 42 Wallaby Way, then you could have an argument for copyright infringement there. Similarly, summarizing a news story in your own words also cannot be copyrighted.

I’m not in favor of something that can put me out of business, or even bite into my earnings, obviously. However, if SOPA in it’s final form is written so that it makes it harder to shut down a web site (investigate complaints and give infringers a chance to fix any copyright issues that they might accidentally have a problem with), then there is a small chance that SOPA may not be as bad as it looks like. I’m not getting my hopes up, but if everybody that is trying to be legitimate but changed their ways as far as copyright infringement goes, then that might be a good thing for legitimate content producers in the end.