I've only come across a handful of people there that weren't completely narcissistic or disingenuous. It can be nice for some and not so nice for others.

I can't find any evidence that this is true, and even if it were true, I wouldn't put my name on that petition. "Stop SOPA. SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Acts. In this case, all fanart will be deleted, all fan-pages, fanfics, fan made videos, etc. Please help stop SOPA." You're sending that to the State Department?

Anyone who cares about freedom of speech should be against any government measure to close a website no matter how much you personally hate it. That's the whole point of freedom of speech. As Evelyn Hall once said "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".

The only exception I'd make is for a site where you could demonstrate a very real harm that outweighs the freedom of speech defence.

Actually, it is only Government that has the power, for now, to protect free speech, and it is the Corporate and private party interests that are pushing these Copyright Control measures through their political influence, against the will of the People, worldwide.

Basically it is about control, not just to pursue profits in attempts to charge a fee for access to anything, or take a cut of anyone else getting income no matter how indirectly from content but, it is also about blocking access to whatever the whims of those in control do not want people to access, for whatever reasons.

The idea is to end Public Domain. It’s blind greed on steroids in all the worst possible ways.

If you really think about it, in business terms, anyone out there using bits of music, or images or movie shorts for their own creative exploration is nominally a form of free advertising for those products and productions. It can get recognition in areas where no professional advertising models can exploit.

All these control measures are getting tiresome. It shows a decided lack of foresight in the modern business professionals and especially top executives of today. They have no vision.

Well put. Related to this is a quote from the article spindown linked:

The business model that the legacy players used to rely on has melted away in the age of the internet. Rather than truly adapt and change, they just get jealous of successful tech companies, and think that those companies somehow "owe" them money. And the best way to legally do that is to get politicians to magically place legal liability on those companies, so they have to pay up. Notice and staydown has nothing to do with actually stopping copyright infringement. It's about taking the burden off of the legacy players, easing the need for them to adapt and change, while trying to force big tech companies to pay up. The irony, of course, is that in the process it would harm much needed innovation from startups and entrepreneurs (the companies that the content creators really need the most) and lock in bigger, more powerful internet players.

They will never stop because they will never stop being greedy.

SOPA again?

You know I keep thinking that if copyright isn't being forcefully circumvented compared to it's original intent (14 year copyright, vs 70+life) then a LARGE number of these bills and problems would just go away.

That's odd. If the TPP would allow content to exist as long as it's legal according to the creator's country laws, wouldn't it clash with SOPAian restrictions?

The TPP is just another example of how governments around the world work constantly to undermine sovereignty and individual liberties. Most people are either too uninformed to pay to attention to it, or they hear about it and blow it off as yet another internet conspiracy theory. I've taken the road less traveled with internet activism now, but it certainly is interesting to watch and see what will get people's attention. Sometimes it's the mundane, sometimes it's the monumental. SOPA and online censorship are really bad, but the internet geek crowd usually only pays lip service to it because they feel their own part of the world being threatened... it's of course always human self-interest.

Unless and until we really care about violations of human liberty (even to those we consider enemies) nothing will change. There's simply not enough people in enough groups to act on their own and force cohesive action. Think about when the hippies marched on Washington back in the 60s to protest the Vietnam war. There wasn't 300 people there, or even 5,000. It was half a million stinky, stoned off their butts hippies burning their draft cards and saying, 'hell no, we won't go.' Nowadays, where can you can 500,000 people to show to do anything other than get a free burger or buy scalped Superbowl tickets?

When the people of the world get fed up with who's leading them and actually get off their butts and do something about it, that's when things will change, and not a minute before. Petitions? I've signed so many that I'm sure some people thought I was a spam bot. They don't do much. They can help if you have other actions alongside it like public protests and/or lawsuits, but on their own they don't amount to much, sadly.

This is the first time I've heard about this...

Fan art? They are trying to ban... Fan art? O_o

This isn't right. T_T

In my mind, I heard the voice of Rowan Atkinson continue with: