SOPA or (Stop Online Piracy Act)

            SOPA or (Stop Online Piracy Act) has been getting a lot of press recently about Congresses’s attempt to limit the piracy that occurs on the internet. In fact, if you go to wikipedia today, you might notice that they blocked out their website in protest of the proposed bill. So with this sparking my interest, I decided to start my blog with Clay Shirky’s Ted Talk, “Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea)”.

            The main argument which Clay Shirky makes in his presentation is that SOPA and the other piece of legislation, PIPA, by fact if not by intention are providing companies with the ability to bypass the normal process of guilty until proven innocent to force websites to censor their user-created content which could lead to the end of the ability for these companies to host this content due to the overwhelming cost of such censorship. He starts his argument with picture of a sign from a local baker saying that they would no longer accept “Images From any Outside Sources” to put on the cake. He then goes on to relate a story about a bakery which initially allowed kids to print their own original drawings onto cakes, but later only used prefabricated images because it was too much of a hassle to police for copyright violations. The image is used to emphasize the small business nature of the store because it is an image of a handwritten sign. He uses then goes on to relate this story about the bakery to the larger context of the internet, using it to emphasize the idea that the legislation could small businesses to simply give up on user-created content. The primary appeal that he used in his argument is pathos. He constantly draws on commonplaces such as the idea of freedom or guilty until proven innocent to show the bill as overturning our governmental foundations and also formulates his argument to create the impression of a progression of increasingly strict copyright laws to make the main copyright law proponents, the recording industries, seem to be big scary organizations trying to methodically destroy the competition posed by user-created content such as youtube videos. He then ended with a warning that “Hollywood” is trying to stop us from creating content and only be like couch potatoes, passively viewing content.