I'm blogging to say I oppose the SOPA and related PIPA acts, or anything at all like it.
I write a lot of free software, nearly all on my own time. I give it away with the hope it helps others. I do this because I feel that I have personally benefited from open source / free software and as a programmer that has made a lifetime career using open source I feel some sense of obligation to do what I can to help others who were in position my 15 years ago.
I wish that people working in content creation would have a more humble sense of their position in history. No story today is unique, everyone has built upon the creative might of the ages. Just as I have benefited from the monumental work of great programmers before me, so do the Hollywood storytellers of now benefit from from the creative genius of thousands of years of human culture.
I agreed that one has the right, if one chooses, to be paid a reasonable sum for reasonable work. I make a good living writing the 'special sauce' for companies on top of solid open source components. We live is a free market economy and I begrudge no one the right to make an honest living. But the right to defend oneselves does not extend to preemptively blocking the wellsprings of human knowledge. It seems to me that there are those in the content and human knowlege industry that would put 99 innocent people against the wall in order to shoot one guilty man. They have an inflated sense of their own importance and an inappropriately inflated sense of entitlement. SOPA and PIPA reflect that overblown ego.
These are the same people that would extend copyright forever. These are the same people that have blackmailed thousands with blanket lawsuits.
For the short term, join me in opposing SOPA and PIPA. For the long term we need to kill the beast at its roots, by reducing our consumption of mass popular media products. Personally I don't even own a TV and haven't bought a CD (or online digital media project) or dvd for years. Think about it.
Thanks for you attention!
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