AbleGamers Stands Against SOPA

On Tuesday, January 24 the most frightening piece of legislation to come up in years will be put up to vote. Yes, I'm referring to SOPA the Stop Online Piracy Act. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to educate yourself. And also, keep in mind, even if you don't live in the United States, this bill would be potentially life altering as sites like Google and Facebook are housed in the United States and may shut down over this bill.

In a nutshell, a third-party government created entity would have the power to shut down any website that even associates itself with copyrighted infringed material. The entire site. Say goodbye to YouTube. And there is no trial, no due process, someone accuses you of infringing on their material and the Attorney General shuts you down. End of story. You can read my take on it in the article we posted last week on why videogamers should care about SOPA.

AbleGamers does not interfere with or talk about political topics. It's not what we do, but in this situation we thought it was important to not only educate you, our readers, but to also publicly take a stand against this potentially disastrous legislation alongside the likes of Distructoid, Reddit, ECA and many others.

On the flipside, AbleGamers deals with members of the ESA on a daily basis. The ESA publicly and staunchly supports SOPA, even though many of its members including Epic publicly denounced the legislation. We do not wish to anger the members of this organization, particularly because we need each and every one of them to work with us to increase game accessibility. However, in this situation, we strongly believe that this legislation will be harmful to the disabled community.

We do not support or condone downloading illegal materials; you should always pay for the games you play. But, the truth of the matter is, much like DRM, Pirates will still continue to pirate and the innocent bystanders will be hurt. As the original bill stood, AbleGamers would have been shut down, thanks to the amount of noise people opposed to the bill made, some amendments have already been made to exclude nonprofits. But that doesn't mean we couldn’t still get in trouble for posting screenshots and video explaining how to use a game successfully with a disability.

To quote LeVar Burton, you don't have to take my word for it.

From Scott Puckett:

One of the advantages to being my age is that I’ve been around long enough to have seen a thing or two, and remained vertical long enough to see them come around again with slightly different wording and slightly different angles.

Today, the dead horse that Washington is dragging around and trying to convince us to buy is the Stop Online Piracy Act, or the Protect IP Act. Over the past decade, we’ve seen the same types of legislation crop up over and over again, apparently because the RIAA and MPAA and other content trade organizations think that it will eventually slip past someone’s notice. For the record? Still a horse. Still dead. Still not buying it.

So, purely for the record, here’s a bit about my background. I’ve had a UNIX shell account for more than 20 years. I remember the Internet before AOL opened up access to it (and there was a reason for the old Usenet aol.users.clueless.clueless.clueless group). I remember the Internet before Mosaic existed and when Marc Andreesen was an undergrad at UIUC. I have space on a co-located UNIX box, even though I rarely use it anymore. I spent half of my consulting history in Web usability and teaching businesses how to leverage the Web’s revolutionary communication potential to better serve their customers and clients, and all of my tech history working with development teams making back-end appliances for data centers. I remember when asking people whether they preferred vi or emacs would start a holy war on Usenet. I remember the Canter & Siegel cross-posting fiasco. I used the Internet in a time when companies would print physical books listing sites for Gopher and Archie. I used Lynx well into the late 1990s, and terrified clients when I showed them what their Web sites looked like to blind people who relied on Lynx to read their text. And I think Kibo responded to a post of mine once.

In that time, I have seen a lot of really terrible legislation proposed. Most of it, thankfully, was stopped by organizations like the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Center for Democracy and Technology. There was the legendarily horrifying Communications Decency Act, a savage little piece of small-minded pandering to values voters which attempted to criminalize speech which was constitutionally protected everywhere else and convince the country that we were in danger of being awash in a sea of filth and degradation which would directly result in sodomy and bestiality and all manner of unnatural and ungodly behavior. Somehow, the republic managed to withstand the barbaric onslaughts of frantically masturbating hordes addicted to unseemly images and lurid tales and people went to work, got married, had kids and generally continued doing the same things we’ve been doing for the last several thousand years, despite the periodic disruptive technological advance which requires immediate intervention to preserve decency, but generally never really seems to do that much damage. The Child Online Protection Act wasn’t much better, and other legislation has come and gone and it’ll been much the same.

The latest bugaboo which poses a clear and present danger to our national trust is piracy. To listen to the RIAA and MPAA froth about it, you’d think that we were literally in danger of being boarded by actual unwashed pirates with scurvy who were going to perform unspeakable acts on anyone they could get their briny hands on and pillage everything else.

To address this issue, lobbyists for Big Content have been pushing for legislation which builds on the nightmare created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. While Wikipedia laughably notes that “the DMCA has been criticized for making it too hard for copyright owners to protect their rights,” anyone even remotely familiar with the astonishing variety of takedown notices filed in error or in outright malice knows the opposite is true. The EFF even has a DMCA takedown Hall Of Shame which lists a handful of the most egregious examples. If you’d like to read more, I suggest you visit the EFF’s list here: https://www.eff.org/takedowns

And now let’s get past the historical roots of legislation like this and move on to the crux of the matter – SOPA / PIPA. While the two pieces of legislation don’t have exactly the same provisions, they both have the same intent, and that intent is effectively allowing trade groups and content producers to determine what constitutes copyright infringement instead of law enforcement and the judicial system. While law enforcement would still be involved, action would be initiated by a content producer and as the case of dajaz1.com shows (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111208/08225217010/breaking-news-feds-falsely-censor-popular-blog-over-year-deny-all-due-process-hide-all-details.shtml), the resulting process is so cryptic and Kafkaesque that it makes being detained at Guantanamo Bay seem as open and public as a season of Big Brother. We aren’t talking about a takedown notice that a site’s owner can challenge – we’re talking about modern day Star Chambers that deny any and all due process, up to and including preventing a site owner’s legal representation from speaking with the judge overseeing the case. This is what is happening right now, before SOPA and PIPA have even been put up for a vote. We already have countless examples of trade groups filing takedown notices for content that they not only do not own but do not represent or have any business interest in. The dajaz1.com example cited above is one particularly egregious example, but there are others, like the Actors’ Equity Association filing a takedown notice for a video posted by the copyright holder, the RIAA sending takedown notices to YouTube over videos of children dancing to songs, Universal Music Group sending YouTube a takedown notice because a company uploaded an ad featuring a number of prominent musicians which Universal felt infringed its copyright despite being an original composition for that advertisement … do a quick search on any search engine for “bogus RIAA takedown notices” and you’ll get a laundry list of shenanigans, none of which can be remedied in court due to the canard that the RIAA believed it was acting in good faith based on the information available.

In short, we – as citizens in a representative democracy – already have allowed a situation to arise in which people are denied due process and subjected to secret court proceedings at the simple say-so of large corporations. Even worse? The redress that victims are allowed to seek is significantly limited … by the same legislation that allowed the takedown to occur.

And instead of fixing that legislation to ensure that organizations at least double-check to make sure something actually constitutes an infringing use and the fair use doctrine doesn’t apply in any way, Congress feels that what we really need to do is give them more power. It’s the equivalent of parents giving a kid a BB gun for Christmas and warning them not to shoot it at that house, then giving them an assault rifle after the kid in question spent the week breaking windows.

Giving additional power to organizations which operate largely outside the law and without fear of any significant or meaningful legal repercussions, and which have already demonstrated countless times that they will abuse the power they already have, is poor policy. It’s poor governance. It’s a terrible f*cking idea whose time has not come and never will because it’s a terrible f*cking idea.

There are so many additional compelling and essential aspect of this legislation that are problematic or disastrous that it seems some sites dedicate themselves to analyzing only one part of it, but to me, right now, this is the most important point.

People who have already demonstrated and, in point of fact, proven that they cannot judiciously wield the power that they were unjustly given do not deserve to have that power expanded. It is literally that simple.

Yes, there are profound technical problems which make the legislation as written virtually impossible to implement because Americans apparently think it’s still cute for our politicians to not understand even the most basic aspects of the technology which they are supposed to be writing legislation for, but there it is.

You don’t give more power to people who have already abused it repeatedly and without any consequence of note.

From Mark Barlet:

In my opinion SOPA is a prime example of why I am so scared when congress and technology cross paths. While I think that the professed outcome of the bill may be admirable, the reality is that old media companies are using this opening given to them by congress to do all they can to halt innovation, and put the internet genie back in the bottle.

All that said, I am almost certain that the mobilization of the very internet that these media companies are looking to stop may be the death of this misguided legislation. When my own father, who is almost

70 years old asks me what is SOPA, because he has heard it on Facebook, then I know that the word is getting out.

I have lived in DC for 15 years and national news is local news to us, and I have learned two things that lead me to believe this is dead.

First, congress only wants you to notice what they are doing when what they are doing has zero controversy behind it, like declaring every other Wednesday "Ice Cream Wednesday." Right now, millions have their eye on what they are doing with SOPA. Secondly rule of DC, "Ice Cream Wednesday" is a nonstarter in an election year, because NO ONE wants to upset those lactose intolerance. The Republicans, especially in the Senate, see a total takeover of the Congress in 2012 within striking distance, and inside the beltway the Senate Republicans are not pleased with those on the House side. They are tired of the House Republicans pulling the pin on mostly unpopular (given our current economic issues) social issues that have no chance of passing the Democratically controlled Senate, and putting them on the spot to have to go on record for or against something. Given how important the internet is shaping up to be in getting elected, Senate Republicans are very learly of doing anything that will be seen as upsetting the very people they need support from.

Convinced? Then send your letters to the ESA. You can find the list of the members of the ESA on their website or the contact information taken from this post at Destructoid. Make some noise and make a difference. When you're done mailing your choice of ESA members, write your congressman, write your representatives, and tell some friends. Don't let this pass by simply believing it won't happen.

The true enemy of any republic is inaction

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