Copyright and commercial interest in copyright are and should be distinct. How aggressively will SOPA protect a Creative Commons license, for example?

Here is where Copyright Law is a powerful weapon: A publisher takes your copyrighted work and publishes it, claiming it as their own work, and then sues YOU for infringement. Protection from that scenario is copyright's primary function. Few people seem willing to accept that, since they really want it to be a weapon that can be used to rigidly control a distribution method.

Be creative and think of ways that this anti-consumer legislation can be twisted into unintended consequences and used against the people it is supposed to protect. Remember that even GPL and Creative Commons licenses derive from Copyright Law. Imagine someone getting a $5,000,000 fine for a GPL violation due to SOPA.

This++.

Copyright seems to be quite poorly understood, even by activists.

Think about something like Creative Commons. The author reserves all rights conferred by Copyright Law, but also expressly intends for his work to be copied and distributed freely. Copyright law is a poor weapon if one's intent is to stop distribution, but it is an excellent and powerful weapon against situations such as someone taking your copyrighted work, publishing it as his own, and then suing YOU for infringement. But that is a pro-independent-producer position, and is not often considered in this debate.

Right now it's all about the media companies and the whole upside down relationship between producers and consumers. The best thing the public could possibly do at this point is to wean themselves off of mainstream media, and start trending more toward independent producing. That's right, I'm saying you should buy a damn guitar. There should be a piano in the space where your TV is. That really good digital camera you got so cheaply should be put to use. You shouldn't be "going to the movies", you should be "making a documentary." There is no reason in this day and age to be a consumer of media, and in fact, it's irresponsible and as it turns out, destructive to democracy.

Few protestors actually say what their specific problem with the bill is. Mine comes from reading the bill (something that few seem willing or able to do!), and my objection to it is mostly due to the fact that SOPA is an anti-drug law as much as it is an internet piracy law. In the stuff about "counterfeit drugs" you will find an oblique escalation of the drug war.

"if I had FB shares I'd dump them. Now."

You do realize that if you had FaceBook shares, it means you're an insider in a privately owned institution, and there's no place to "dump" them.... right?

I keep hoping that all this draconian copyright legislation has the following unintended consequences:

1. Creative works of independent origin become far more common, eclipsing the corpus of work that is represented by "mainstream media publishing".

2. The same draconian laws that are meant to protect corporate publishers, put an extremely powerful weapon into the hands of independent authors.

Imagine if stuff like the $5,000,000 fine provisions of a law like SOPA could be applied to enforce compliance with Creative Commons licensing terms.

Stop consuming the stuff "They" want you to consume. Everybody should be making their own stuff already, totally making "Them" irrelevant. Do it for profit, do it for fun, do it just because you can, but for goodness sake, do it. Take photos with these great cameras we have today, and publish them. Write songs, and set them to music with these awesome music making tools we have. Make your own films. Don't do it in terms of "competing with the industry." Do it *in spite* of "the industry." Make it so that there's so much media of independent origin that the media corporations have to work to compete with the public. And when someone takes your copyrighted work and publishes it as their own, use the weapon that copyright law provides. This alone could end up bringing down the media cartels.

But nobody really wants to be creative just because they can, do they?

It's already a drug law masquerading as an anti-piracy law. It's shocking how few people who are protesting seem to have actually read the bill.

The UK should have thought about that when it insisted on signing the Berne Convention! You make your choices. Accept the consequences.

I have yet to hear anyone mention anything about how much of SOPA is an anti-drug bill. This tells me that, yet again, people are protesting a bill they haven't read. This was essentially my argument about the NDAA protests also.

The last time I checked, the UK government was highly democratic. Even though it is technically a monarchy, it certainly has a transparent process of lawmaking. If there's some question of sovereignty here, at least the people of the UK can settle such a matter by going as far as calling for a general election *at any time*. I would venture to say that this particular matter is conducted in a way that meets with the (at least tacit) approval of the overwhelming majority of citizens of the UK. So if there's a question of sovereignty, it's that the sovereignty of the UK has been ceded to the British. I can't see the problem.
 

"what have we become ?"

Nations who enter into treaties with one another and then abide by the terms of those treaties?

Don't think in terms of "missing your flight."

Stop being one of the fewer than 15% of Americans who travels by air more than once per year. I suggest that, like it or not, you are part of the problem.

It's on a long list of promises that presidential candidates commonly make but which they have zero authority to deliver.
Rewriting tax code? Eliminating federal agencies whose authority derives from legislative rules? Outlawing abortion? Legalizing or criminalizing a drug? If any of these things was an objective of the candidate, he or she would be much closer to that authority by running for Congress, because these are in no way within the authority of the President.

A big chunk of First Amendment philosophy stems from a case concerning people protesting the military draft -- the WWI (one!) military draft. Hippies are not such a recent phenomenon.