It doesn’t matter if your from Canada or anywhere else in the world, this new bill WILL EFFECT YOU!  http://totaldream.org/  This site will be blacked out all tomorrow. I suggest you black out your sites too! 
http://sopastrike.com/

Well, no.  Just because I think that SOPA is the wrong direction to take doesn’t mean it’s up to me to define the correct one.

The issue with piracy does come back to artists needing to eat, however, like any other profession, the Artist needs to define what works for him/her given the world they live in.  Things are changing.  Quickly. 

If you dislike piracy, that’s understandable, people like to get paid.  But I will not suggest something better than SOPA to end piracy because I don’t see piracy as an issue.  

The internet is used by many people for many things, just because someone disagrees with how another person is using it DOES NOT give that person the right to support censorship of the ENTIRE internet.

I’m not going to demonize anyone for disliking internet piracy, it’s a personal choice, but trying to drum up sympathy by playing the overworked and under appreciated artist card won’t cut it.  I work 12 hour days, go to school part time, run a website, keep house, hand code ebooks, and raise my daughter.

Unfortunately, this argument could go on forever because we both disagree on the whole “piracy” issue, but have you read through the power that SOPA gives the government?  Imagine you receive a favorable book review from a review blog.  You decide to link to it and share the good news.  Later that week they get accused of posting something on their blog that violates someone’s copyright – ACCUSED, not PROVEN GUILTY.  Not only can their site be blocked at the DNS leve, but so could yours for simply linking to it.

Would this prevent piracy?  No.  Nothing will, in my opinion.  It would make it harder, sure.  But at what cost?

There is I believe a not so hidden agenda here. According to Wikipedia, Mr. Doctorow believes that all internet content should be free unless purchased directly from the content creator. The honor system with no consequence for those who have no honor. While there still may be incentive to create (art for art’s sake) the reality is that to continue to create and thrive as an artist, musician, writer, you need to be paid, independently wealthy, or have a wealthy patron. Or maintain a website with advertising, turn writing into a business that feeds on itself. Or maybe we will end up under the Medicis, and the rich will decide once again what is available. Until then, if you plan to survive as a content creator, you need to be paid for it. Or your output will be limited while you labor at your day job and lets hope you are not too tired or have too many family obligations at night to work on that second novel. I suppose you could always get divorced. Art comes first after all. The vast majority of writers and musicians are not wealthy and they are being hurt.

I suspect any suggestion or proposed law to limit intellectual property theft would be met with resistance and decried as censorship here. We rightfully scream when cheap foreign labor is used to produce computers and clothes but what do we do when writers and other artists are expected to spend hundreds of unpaid hours producing content for our edification and entertainment?  We scream “censorship!” when they have the audacitiy to expect to be paid – because some internet pundits have declared that all digital content should be available for free and the party line has become that allowing free sharing of content hurts only corporations. 

If not SOPA, suggest something else. Something effective and enforceable. 

I’m also an Indie Publisher, having helped my wife and a few others release their books but I also uploaded the books to Demonoid before their official release.  Why?  Because I feel that obscurity is a far bigger concern than piracy, especially for indie artists.  

I don’t mention that to argue, merely to provide some background that we are coming from similar positions although our thoughts on piracy differ.  

Again, to me the discussion isn’t so much about piracy as it is the federal government using piracy as a scare tactic to rally support to allow them to censor the internet.  

It would be a lot like what copyright holders are experiencing now. 

Problem solved :D

Fight the good fight!

These sites have probably calculated how much this will cost them in ad revenue and are willing to accept that to make their point, rather than spending that much or more on your list of alternatives (which to make any sort of impact would involve much more money than the lost ad revenue).

I think in the case of services like flickr, tumblr, facebook, etc. who AFAICT don’t plan to go black the best choice for users is to put up an explanatory image (perhaps repeat it several times throughout the day) so that people who are following you, at least, will see it.

I’d be interested from a technical standpoint in a solution that will replace all your flickr photos and then revert them, but based on my extensive experience with things that use the flickr API that sounds like something that’s rife with the chance of huge errors and the potential to accidentally lose all kinds of stuff from your flickr stream.

I’m trying to figure out why we’re having a rash of multiple postings.  Can you either e-mail me or tell me here why your comment showed up four times, please?