"Stop pirating my stories about SOPA, or I'll have to support it"

http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/18/10183061-stop-pirating-my-stories-about-sopa-or-ill-have-to-support-it

By Bob Sullivan
Jan. 18, 2012

SOPA – Maybe I’m for it after all.

I’m as adamant a supporter of Web free speech as you’ll find. And there’s a lot to dislike about the Stop Online Piracy Act. But when my stories about Web free speech are stolen and posted in their entirety by “rogue” websites, my head hurts. Stealing content is a funny way to prove your anti-SOPA credentials.

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I have no patience for Internet users who copy movies, music or software whole-hog, share it with their friends for free and then cry foul at efforts to stop this.

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I’m not in favor of SOPA. Blacklisting entire domains is a terrible idea that seems to have been beaten back by reason. Jailing alleged pirates would be Draconian in most cases. Using the U.S. Justice Department to enforce multinational corporations’ intellectual property rights through the criminal court system makes me queasy. Placing the burden of proof on small websites to show they aren’t violating copyrights is a dangerous turnabout of U.S. law. And perhaps most important, it’s highly doubtful that SOPA would be effective in stopping the kind of content theft I’m writing about here.

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The real problem is Web culture that suggests everything is free, or should be free. That’s just not a grown-up way of looking at the world.
[Exactly. It takes a lot of time and money to run the web, buy music and video equipment, learn to use it well, travel to places to investigate things, etc. If you think it should be free, why aren't you creating it and providing it for free instead of expecting others to do it for you?]

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