DAMMIT.

What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? At the TED offices, Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto -- a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume.

Gives history, including COPA.

When I found out Fight for the Future needed help with their campaign against a new bill called PROTECT-IP, I had to take a little time away from Everything is a Remix Part 4 and produce the video above. PROTECT-IP is the latest piece of legislation aiming to chip away at your online rights in the name of protecting the entertainment industry's business model. It's legislation that won't work, will give us yet more lawsuits, and will make the net worse.

Whether you lean right and hate business regulation, lean left and hate censorship, or lean neither way but hate useless legislation, PROTECT-IP is a bill everyone should oppose. I encourage you to head over to Fight For the Future and contact congress.

http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa

A lot of people are concerned about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. There are plenty of pages that say that it will destroy the Internet, but very few that explain clearly exactly why. It has also become clear that the politicians writing the law have no idea how the Internet actually works. So here is my attempt to explain it all. Let me start by explaining DNS, using a situation that doesn’t involve computers, that hopefully anyone can understand.

Original image thanks to Christopher Dombres and Creative Commons licensing.I oppose SOPA unequivocally; it's vague, it's anti-free-speech, and it won't solve the problem it's designed to combat

Who Controls Ebook Rights, Future Technology Clause, Or Hereinafter Invented

On January 1, " Public Domain Day ", another year was added to the copyright gap between the US and the rest of the world. In most of the ...

The U.S. Congress is considering the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). MythBuster Adam Savage says that if these sweeping pieces of legislation pass, the U.S. will join the likes of China and Iran in censoring the Internet.

Eric Goldman breaks down the OPEN Act, legislation that was unveiled last week …

A publisher looks back in time nearly 150 years to complete its digital collection

The RIAA has been complaining that the DMCA's safe harbor gives too much  …

The House version of the PROTECT IP Act is here—and it's bad.

Pretty good timeline/description of copyright tensions.

Sims article. The licenses libraries agree to can be used to bring criminal prosecutions against our users. (TOS violations may be prosecutable "computer fraud.")