[itplszzq] SOPA / PIPA is censorship

I am pleased that many others have also identified the SOPA and PIPA bills before Congress to be censorship, because that is how I see it: that is why this issue is so important.

This issue is not about kids downloading music and movies, not about musicians and movie studies losing money or cutting jobs.  This is about our right to free speech, one of our most precious freedoms, one of the defining principles of democracy.

As bad as our economy may currently be, there are things more important than jobs.  Freedom of speech is one of them.

(Soviet communism, complete with even more censorship and oppression, could give us 0% unemployment.  As attractive as that may seem, it comes at exquisite cost of giving up freedom.)

(Weaker copyright law can create jobs, and today's too-strong copyright law has already destroyed jobs at Grokster and Lime.)

When one person wishes to communicate information to another person, any barrier to that communication is censorship.  Even if that information is copyrighted by a third party, what is being communicated are the ideas embedded in the copyrighted content.  Blocking piracy is blocking the free flow of ideas: it is censorship, explicitly, obviously, and in its worst form.

Certainly a lot of copyright piracy amounts to inane speech, not communicating ideas vital to the proper functioning of our democracy; however, most other speech is inane the same way, but is nonetheless protected.

Others oppose SOPA / PIPA because a lot of legitimate speech may be censored along with blocking access to pirated material.  That is a valid argument, but I am taking it further: Pirated material is itself legitimate speech (and law should be changed to reflect this).  This is in anticipation of altered versions of SOPA / PIPA being proposed.  No version of a bill, however altered, which censors pirated material should be allowed to become law. (Others liken SOPA / PIPA to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I believe neither the baby nor the bathwater should be thrown out.)

After much thought, I feel the best way is to roll back copyright law to a form, and philosophy, that produced tremendous content and creativity for hundreds (if not millions) of years: lift all restrictions to noncommercial copying.  Noncommercial copying, that is, one person communicating ideas to another person without trying to make money off of it, is exactly the kind of speech that a democracy should protect.

Yes, such a roll back will cause vast changes in the entertainment industry, but people want to entertain; people want to be entertained.  They will continue to find a way! (I have explored a few in this blog: Donation log and references )

(Meta: writing essays like this has gotten a lot easier as I continue to get lots of practice.)